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

DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994                   TAG: 9410170020
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: LUCILLE GRIFFIN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AMERICAN CHESTNUT COOPERATORS TRYING TO BRING TREE BACK

The chestnut harvest at the Martin American Chestnut Planting site on Salt Pond Mountain in Giles County has just finished. They dropped about a week earlier than usual, probably because of the drought in early September, so squirrels and chipmunks had already claimed half the crop.

I used to do the harvest myself, cutting out the burs on each tree as soon as one cracked open. Occasionally our son helped, until he graduated and moved out of state. Last year, with several of the trees more than 35 feet tall, the job became too much. This year I got some help the first day from a couple from Beckley, W.Va., and my grandchildren. Two retired Virginia gentlemen helped out another day, followed by a father and son from Kentucky.

In the beginning of this century, before the blight, school would not begin in mountain communities until after chestnut harvest, because everyone gathered chestnuts. In Patrick County, solid stands of chestnut covered many slopes, providing the main cash crop for subsistence farmers. A railroad was built to Stuart especially to transport chestnuts to market in the big eastern cities.

In the '50s, after chestnut blight swept the entire natural range in the Appalachian Mountains and the eastern foothills, nearly all the American chestnuts died. Just a few old chestnuts survived.

Gary Griffin, professor of plant pathology at Virginia Tech, and John Elkins, professor of chemistry at Concord College in West Virginia, tested many of these old trees for blight resistance by inoculating them with a killing strain of the blight fungus, which makes a sunken canker that expands rapidly until the tree is girdled. Several trees showed levels of blight resistance that could be used in a breeding program.

The late Bruce Given, leader of the West Virginia Division of Forestry's American Chestnut Project, collected and grafted shoots from some of these survivors. When the grafts flowered, Elkins and Griffin made controlled pollinations among them. The nuts from these first all-American inter-crosses were raised at Virginia Tech. Miles Horton deeded some land in Giles County to the university to make the American chestnut planting and named it after Miss Flossie Martin of Winston-Salem, a high school biology teacher who inspired his life-long interest in science.

Unfortunately, this planting was just the beginning of a solution. When these had grown to an inch and a half in diameter at breast height, Griffin injected them with the blight fungus. Only a small number passed this test and showed significant resistance to the blight. More generations of breeding are necessary to create American chestnuts whose blight resistance is regularly inheritable.

Each summer, Elkins makes more controlled pollinations among the American chestnuts that showed blight resistance, and he plants some of the previous year's inter-crosses to fill in the spaces of the trees that died. Griffin tests the new trees as they reach the critical size. Some of the chestnuts killed by blight continue to make new sprouts from the old root system. Into these sprouts we graft our best sources of American chestnut blight resistance. Thus, the planting is improved a little more each year, and future seed-nut crops should reflect this improvement in better percentages of blight-resistant American chestnuts.

This year is the 10th anniversary for the American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation seed-nut distributions. I shall be filling requests from our cooperating growers for seed nuts this month. All remaining nuts go to the nursery to make year-old seedlings for 1995 distribution. A large number of seedlings from last year's nut crop are still available. Trees from foundation nuts are now growing in 38 states, Canada, England, Italy and New Zealand. They are raised by cooperating growers who agree to report annually on their trees' progress; some have reported nut production in 1994. These would be our great-grand-chestnuts!

To learn more about local efforts to restore American chestnut trees to our forests and or to grow American chestnut seedlings, please write to: American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation, 2776 Forest Service Road 708, Newport, Va. 24128.

Lucille Griffin of Newport is executive director of the American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation.

by CNB