Trouble with the Trees
Late one evening, a visitor to the Norlands mentioned a unique-looking tree that she had encountered along one of our more overgrown carriage trails. “I think it’s a type of chestnut,” she told me. Intrigued, the following week I went out looking for it. As I stomped my way through the underbrush, I expected to come upon a towering Horse chestnut or a verdant Chinese chestnut, two species that are fairly common in Maine. Instead, I was shocked to find myself greeted by something much rarer: a tall, spindly, half-dead mess of a tree that appeared to be an American chestnut.
Researchers consider the American chestnut tree to be functionally extinct. Of course, this was not always so. According to the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), the species was once abundant in eastern forests, numbering nearly 4 billion. Indigenous peoples have had longstanding relationships with chestnut trees, as their fruits are dense with calories and rich in vitamin C and antioxidants. European settlers benefited from the American chestnut as well, as its wood was rot-resistant, straight-grained, and well-suited for building material.
Then, in the early 1900s, disaster struck. A deadly fungal blight caused by Cryphonectria parasitica was introduced from Asia. It decimated the American chestnut population. Nowadays, most American chestnuts that you encounter growing in the wild are saplings. The blight often infects and kills them before they can mature.
So you can imagine my surprise when the first spiky bur crunched beneath my feet in the area just to the right of the trail. Despite its spindly appearance and some dieback in the upper canopy, this specimen was still mature and healthy enough to produce fruit!
Our tree has already been reported to the Norlands’ iNaturalist project, and we hope to harvest and send a sample off to TACF by the end of the summer. This will help confirm whether the tree is indeed a pure American Chestnut (and it may not be). If it is though, it will be entered into a database for future research. They may also provide advice on how best to protect and preserve it.
This experience made me think about the people and trees that have come before me here at the Norlands. As you may know, the first house built on this property was called The Elms. It was so-named for the mighty American elms that once towered over the mansion. In the 1930s, however, Dutch elm disease was introduced to the United States through infected logs imported from Europe. Today, over 95% of American Elms are gone, including those that once stood outside the Norlands. As with the American Chestnut, it is not so uncommon to encounter an elm sapling; however, the disease often kills them before they reach maturity.
Why did our elms die off while our little American chestnut survived? We don’t know yet. The tree may be a hybrid of multiple chestnut species. If it is American, it may simply have avoided severe infection, or—perhaps the most intriguing possibility—it may possess some natural level of resistance to the blight. Surviving mature American chestnuts and American elms are especially important because they may carry genetic traits that help them resist these devastating diseases, making them invaluable to conservation efforts. This is why it is so important to catalogue and study them, and I hope that we at the Norlands can play a small part in the nationwide effort to someday restore these stately trees to their former abundance.
