A Race to Save the Ash Tree

The American chestnut, barely hanging on. (The Washington Post)

American chestnuts were one of the predominant species of hardwood in forests east of the Mississippi. The tree played a major role in American history and culture: The wood was excellent for timber, rot-resistant and straight-splitting, and the nuts were a significant source of food for people and wild game. It didn't hurt that with great age, the chestnut formed a beautiful thick and furrowed trunk and a broad spreading canopy.

A century ago, a blight disease arrived from Asia and went to town on a defenseless species. The resulting canker destroys the vascular system. Typically, a tree might fall or be cut down, but new suckers would emerge from the persisting root system. Once the stems grow for a few years, the blight returns to kill them. A fraction of these ghosts turn out to have a genetic resistance to the disease, so while they may get the disease and eventually succumb to it, they can grow as high as 60 or 70 feet, develop a 12-inch-thick trunk and produce fruit.

These survivors are now helping to restore the chestnut through the efforts of the American Chestnut Foundation, whose staff members have raised 17,000 resistant trees on more than 130 acres in southwestern Virginia. Scientists started by crossing blight-resistant Chinese chestnut trees with surviving American ones, and then used those hybrids to produce successive generations of purely American hybrids.

Volunteers with the foundation's fledgling Virginia chapter are now using pollen from that breeding program in making new lines of resistant chestnuts. This is how I found myself on the first Saturday of the summer in a woodland in Fauquier County with volunteers Deborah Fialka of Fairfax, and Jack LaMonica of Marshall and his son John, a recent Virginia Tech grad. Bartlett Tree Experts had donated the services of an impressive cherry picker truck and its operator, Jimmy Bergdorf.

Two weeks earlier, volunteers had prepped one tree in Fairfax, surviving in the midst of a townhouse development near George Mason University, as well as four trees at two locations around Marshall. Using the cherry picker and ladders, they had removed the emerging male catkins of each inflorescence and then covered the immature female flowers in white bags, to prevent uncontrolled pollination.

Fialka, who had spent almost an hour in the air pollinating the Fairfax tree, handed me a vial of pollen and suggested I go aloft with Bergdorf at one of the Marshall sites. With the hydraulic arm fully extended, we found ourselves in a peaceful, leafy world, and the idea that I held the future of the American chestnut in my hands seemed to chase away any thoughts of vertigo.

The team will return in September to harvest the nuts, which will be planted in an orchard at the Virginia State Arboretum east of Winchester and on private land. The chestnuts will take at least seven years to produce another generation of nuts.

At our final site, minus the cherry picker, we held a huge wooden stepladder while Jack LaMonica repeated the process. There was something uplifting about all this, knowing that while those of us in middle age won't see the giants that once graced the forests of Appalachia, John's children or grandchildren might. Or as Fialka put it, "You and I have never tasted a Virginia ham fatted on chestnuts. That would be something."

How easy it is to kill a tree. How hard to bring it back.