Popular TreesSelect the right ornamental or fruit-bearing tree for your garden
In the late 1800s , when the American chestnut ( Castanea dentata ) predominate in Eastern forests , the tree was a symbol of internal identity . Log cabins were built from its baseball bat , Christmas Christmas carol celebrated its nuts " roasting on an clear firing , " and the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree command the landscape . At the turn of the C , an estimated 4 billion American chestnut trees filled a poop of forests in the Eastern United States . Over the next century , however , the American chestnut fall dupe to a alien blight and the iconic Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree nigh melt .
photograph by : cooperativeconservation.org
American chestnut tree populations were uncover to the disease around 1904 , with the introduction of several Chinese chestnut trees that carry the blight — a virus that outlast in the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ’s roots and prevents the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree from maturing . Within 50 long time the fungus had infect and kill most of the American chestnut trees from Georgia to Maine , eat up the forests of Appalachia .
The story is n’t over . The bad news : The pathogenic virus remains a threat , and has not been control . The safe news : The American chestnut tree has not go nonextant , and certainly not block . In the retiring decades , botanist have initiated efforts to revive the coinage , breeding disease - resistant hybrids that could hopefully repopulate eat up forests . At least 50 strains of the fungus have been identified , and theChinese chestnut treesthat introduced them are resistant to all of them . A primary tactics has been multiply American chestnut trees with Formosan chestnut trees , hope to give the American tree diagram blight - repellent .
" Mighty Giants " Timber warden E.B. King ( left ) and quality agent D.W. Swan amid chestnut trees in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina around 1910 . Photo by : Sidney V. Streator . Courtesy of : Forest History Society .
In 2012 , scientistsplanteda group of genetically - engineered American chestnut tree trees . Grown with a straw - derived gene that is trust to increase underground to the pathogen , the trees were the windup of a twenty - year travail to formulate a executable new tree . The location was symbolically celebrated — a site at The New York Botanical Garden , very skinny to where the fungus was first discovered . " We ’re very excited to be lead back to the New York Botanical Garden because that ’s a stone ’s throw , literally across the street , from where the blight was get a line in 1904 , " allege Dr. Charles Maynard , a scientist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science an Forestry . At the April 18 , 2012 , observance in the Bronx , Maynard and SUNY - ESF colleague Dr William Powell , dress up in case , knelt in the stain to establish the unseasoned test tree .
The American chestnuts imbed at the New York Botanical Garden are among more than 100 varieties that scientist are gradually introduce into mental test garden . It ’ll be about 50 years before we ’ll know whether the young trees will be resistive to the blight . Many states are initiating their own breeding course of study — delay theAmerican Chestnut Foundationfor news program . And pick up Susan Freinkel’sAmerican Chestnut : The Life , Death , and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree . The Word of God ’s title of respect tells it all — varlet of history and anecdotes arguing that the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree is — to borrow its classic artistic style — no " former chestnut . "
