![]() "It's like picking apples, but with pricks," laughed Jim Tolton, a technician on the farm, during a chestnut harvest day in early October.īefore the disease, the American chestnut tree "grew tall and straight through the forest, fighting for light," Lakoba said.īut the blight causes cankers to appear on the branches and stems of the American chestnut tree.īlighted trees grow other branches here and there, giving them a bushy appearance, instead of maintaining a tall, straight shape. Workers use a crane to harvest the burrs, or spiny prickly shells that cover the nuts, then take them to a shed to be studied and used for future planting. Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, the foundation's main laboratory farm spans 36 hectares (almost 90 acres) in Virginia and includes tens of thousands of trees. ![]() Today, only a few rare specimens still survive to adulthood in the wild. "The devastation was so fast," said Lakoba, referring to "ghost forests." It has been considered the greatest tragedy in the history of American forestry. In less than three decades, millions of American chestnut trees had perished. Chestnuts made up about 50 percent of hardwood forests in much of the eastern seaboard, and the wood was ideal for building.īut then came a terrible fungus, identified in 1904 at the Bronx Zoo on a tree from Japan. Settlers along the US eastern seaboard relied on abundant chestnut trees to feed their hogs, their children and themselves. He pointed to a patch of stunted shrubs, chestnut trees that were a far cry from the noble, erect chestnut trees of yesteryear. "These look like death," said Vasiliy Lakoba, research director for the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF), which has been working since the 1980s to resurrect the species.
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