American chestnut, Castanea dentata (Marsh.) Borkh., is one of the greatest
botanical tragedies due to the billions of trees lost because of an introduced
blight.It was once so dominate that
it is claimed a squirrel could travel from Georgia
to Maine on
American chestnut branches or similarly form the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River, but the historic range does not support the later claim.The memory has
become so faint that the remaining legacy is only some place names and a reference in a
Christmas song. Consequently I have seen where a relatively large tree, although nothing comparable to the former glory, had been cut down because it was not even
recognized in a way similar to hiring somebody just to clear an area for a driveway and house footprint, but getting a fully wooded lot bulldozed save a few scraggly "shade trees" before you could stop them.I have heard about others being destroyed just because they were a little bit in the way of
individuals that don’t know and don’t care what they were.
Currently parts of the former range are being restored using blight resistant 15/16th
American-Chinese hybrids.A virus that makes the blight hypoviralent, and thus less damaging, is a
claimed treatment, but I have not even got a response when inquiring about the possiblity of getting my tree treated, therefore
it seems to be just bunk.
Another native
chestnut is chinquapin, C. pumila(L.) Mill., also
spelled chinkapin, has single nuts rather than up to three per bur.Chinquapin appears to be is less susceptible to the blight
even though it was also virtually extirpated around here, but it is available true
to type from some nurseries.Depending
on the authority there are a couple of varieties, one from the Ozarks, which was once claimed to be
the only woody plant with a limited distribution range centralized on Arkansas (there is now a species of oak, Quercus acerifolia(Palmer) Stoynoff & Hess, and a species of medlar, Mespilus canescens J.B.Phipps, that share that distinction since both are indigionous to Arkansas), and
another chinquapin from Florida that is more of a colonial shrub with an extensive root
structure that makes it adapted to sandy soil and tolerant of frequent
fire.
I have planted hundreds of seed that had
been mailed, but none of them ever germinated despite both the sender and an intermediate recipient
claiming nearly 100% rates for seed not mailed indicating a problem with
mailing seed because this has also happened with other species.Most of the native chestnuts and chinquapins
I have seen are deep in forest and usually on steep slopes. The biggest chinquapin I have seen was at DeSotoState
Park where it took a double look to realize that is was not a stunted chestnut oak, Q. montana Willd., due to having burrs rather than acorns, but it died before being measured for a
state champion nomination, while the
largest American chestnuts I have seen were all standing dead by that time and
only a few of those still produce sucker sprouts. The state champion of American chestnut is 74 feet tall, 41 inches in circumference and has an average limb spread of 28 feet, but there is not a current state champion for chinquapin. This or another similarly large American chestnut found in Alabama was reported to have some chinquapin ancestry, which is not surprising consider commonly occuring natural hybrid known as Castanea ×neglecta Dode (pro sp.) [dentata × pumila]. I would not be surprised if most of the chestnuts that are surviving as sucker sprouts are at least part chinquapin thus combining the shrubs ability to sucker with the trees vigor of growth, thus allowing them to continue to survive despite repeted infestation of the blight that kills everything above ground. This also seems to be confirmed because so few of those that I have seen had what are reported to be definitive keys relative to the color of the twigs along with some other intermediate characteristics.
