Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993                   TAG: 9309020311
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TWO TREES

Yet virtually all that is left of the American chestnut is the memory. These creations grew as tall as 100 feet in their 600-year lifespan. Their long, feathery, white flowers laced the Appalachians as if in snow in July and August. Their wood was beautiful, straight and strong, their nutmeats small and sweet.

They are almost gone now, destroyed by a chestnut blight imported by accident from the Orient around the turn of the century and unstoppable in its devastating advance through the Eastern forests. The disease, first noticed in 1904 in New York, had decimated the chestnut population over a 1,000-mile area by 1925, and had driven the species into virtual extinction by the 1950s.

Yet here are two trees, American chestnuts, 40-feet tall and growing in eastern Botetourt County, in the Jefferson National Forest. These apparently are not hybrids, American chestnuts cross-bred with Asian species resistant to the blight, but the genuine article - survivors of a species whose high-quality, rot-resistant timber helped build this nation.

The chestnuts found in Botetourt are a small miracle: not unique, but rare. And their discovery there, where they have thrived despite all odds, without the hand of man to cultivate them or protect them, raises the spirits, somehow.

Scientists had worked unsuccessfully for decades to find a way to save the American chestnut. As many as 4 billion of the trees died, the course of the blight undeterred by all efforts. Yet here are two trees, American chestnuts, that aren't supposed to be alive. They have defied doom.

That is especially satisfying, perhaps because the chestnut is part of the American consciousness still, even though few Americans today have ever seen one. They may know of it from Longfellow's poem, ``The Village Blacksmith:'' ``Under the spreading chestnut tree/The village smithy stands.''

Standing anywhere else, the smithy wouldn't evoke the same recollection of rural Americana. ``Under the spreading walnut tree'' has the same meter, but none of the romance.

The smithy is cooled, we imagine; the chestnut was valued for its shade. Among its other remarkable properties were its wood. Its bark, used for tanning leather. Its nuts, a cash crop. Its destruction was the loss of a treasure.

There is hope, though. Perhaps some day we'll be able to see the American chestnut without driving to the Botetourt spot where tree-lovers found these two. After decades of fruitless efforts to rid the forests of chestnut blight, a couple of scientists have produced synthetic viruses that fight off the fungus.

Perhaps the rare American chestnuts still found in woods will be the seeds of a renewed chestnut forest and, around the turn of another century, the species again will cover the Appalachians.