I went on a walk into a patch of old growth Carolinian woods yesterday to give thanks to the trees, connect with ancestors and appreciate the beautiful fall colors and I was guided to discover an American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) tree.

The tree was about 11 inches in diameter and likely of nut producing age.

For those that do not understand the significance of this discovery here is an excerpt from “Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies” by Akiva Silver that focuses on this species.

“The Epic Saga of the American Chestnut

The American chestnut may well be the greatest and most useful forest tree to ever grow on this Earth. Its decline is considered by many ecologists to be one of the greatest ecological disasters to strike the US since European contact.

It is hard for us today to understand what was lost because we did not witness it. Imagine working in your yard and noticing an apple tree with wilted leaves. A few weeks later, the tree dies. You're sad about this and tell a friend, who tells you that they had the same thing happen.

Then you hear it from lots of people. It's on the news. Apple trees are dying, orchards are wiped out, wild trees disappear. No one knows what to do. Before you know it there are no cider barns, no crisp fruits to sink your teeth into, no apple blossoms in the spring, no fruit in the supermarket. How would you feel? As the years go on, you might try to explain to young people what an apple tasted like, what it felt like to bite into apples; you might describe the trees' gnarly growth habits or the smell of cider in the barn or the taste of applesauce. They would never understand. The apple tree would be gone and life would go on. Other trees would be there, but none would be the apple. This is basically what happened to the American chestnut. The chestnut was no less loved or used than apples are today. It was a tree with full cultural, economic, and wild significance. We are the people who were born after its loss. All we have are the stories and a handful of pictures to go by.

Castanea dentata dominated the eastern US, making up roughly one-fourth of the trees in its range. This is a huge percentage, considering the diversity found in the eastern deciduous forests. Even maples, oaks, and ash are not that common.

American chestnut trunks were massive, often I0 feet or more in diameter, with canopies reaching 130 feet in the air.

The wood value alone would have made the American chestnut a highly valuable tree. Adding the dependable crops of nuts makes this tree stand alone in its excellence. The wildlife value of American chestnut was unparalleled, as nuts could fill the forest floor more than a foot deep in some years, Along with wildlife, people also ate wild American chestnuts. They grazed their animals under these magnanimous giants during the fall and gathered nuts by hand. Chestnuts were collected in great quantities throughout the Appalachian Mountains, and roasted and sold on the streets of towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Train-car loads were filled with this wild crop. Today many families find financial relief with their end-of-year tax credit. Back then people found their Christmas bonus in the form of selling what chestnuts they could gather in the mountains.

The American chestnut was a keystone species in the ecology of the Appalachians.

In 1904 chestnut blight, Cryphonectra parasitica, was discovered in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. From there it spread like a wildfire, consuming trees and turning forests of green into silvery gray ghost woods.

Within just 25 years an estimated four billion trees died.“

The government and forestry people told landowners to chop down all the elder chestnuts on their property before the blight got them to profit from the lumber.

Here in Ontario, at the most northern tip of the trees range, some landowners did not listen to that advice from our benevolent governments and so over, now, 2000 trees survived and are still living here, some are blight resistant.

That tree I discovered may be blight resistant.

Next year I’ll save seeds and plant them out.

The resulting trees could send out massive trophic cascade ripple effects.