Appalachian Giant

Imagine hiking on the Bull Run Mountains on a cool fall day. In the flood plain, we find sycamores and tulip poplars four to five feet in diameter. After losing ourselves in a swift, cold stream teeming with darners, minnows, shiners, and brook trout, we try to decipher sights and sounds that are coming faster than our senses can discriminate.

Immediately after departing one treasure, our upward ascent brings us to coves, hollows, and gentle eastern slopes that all appear to be molded by 130-foot red oaks, white oaks, various hickories, and white ashes. On the west facing side of the hollows we have barren acidic chestnut-oak/heath and pine-oak/heath communities that have been scarred by fire; on the east facing side, rich basic oak hickory forests that appear unburnable.

When we reach the ridgeline, we enter an extensive stand of pitch pines. Their trunks bear clusters of short, needle-loaded branches that give them an unshaven look. Their deeply fissured bark scales resist fire as they effectively burn like hairs on a hand, far from the life giving cambium. The scene melts into a pure stand of table-mountain pine, whose lower branches droop gracefully and are loaded with squat cones composed of large scales that once open, expose large, stout, strongly hooked spines.

As we join the human struggle to find a consistent thread in this world, we reflect back on our journey, only to stumble upon the fact that one type of tree “sows” this mountain together: Castanea dentata, the American chestnut. In the bottomlands these trees sky to 150 feet and have six-foot diameters. In the mid-slopes they are dominant in many of the hardwood communities. On the ridge they are sub-dominant in all of the hardwood communities. In fact we never were out of sight of a chestnut on the entire hike.

Luckily in this fictional walk we did collect some of the American chestnut mast throughout the hike, even robbing some of the squirrels’ caches along the way. Time to make a little extra cash by selling them to city folk as a major holiday treat “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

Today, most of the elements in the mountain communities are intact, but the thread that was part of almost every hardwood community in all of Appalachia, the American chestnut, is nothing but a ghost, with only rootstock sprouts to remind us of what used to be a constant.

Introduced around 1890 with a nursery shipment of Asian chestnuts, the first signs of the fungus blight, Cryphonectria parasitica, were witnessed in the trunks of American chestnuts by 1904. The American chestnut was completely eliminated, as a defining component to any North American hardwood forest community, in less than 40 years.

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) has hybridized American chestnuts (Castanea dentata) with the desirable characteristic blight resistance of the Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima), using a technique known as “backcrossing.”

Instead of the usual story line of loss and destruction, the American chestnut offers the hope of renewal and resurrection. Here is to hoping our grandchildren will once again be roasting American chestnuts on an open fire