[Magdalen] Nature goes tee hee

[Grace Cangialosi]

Jim,
The American Chestnut Foundation is based near here, and I have several friends who are very involved with this.
They are crossing American Chestnuts with the Chinese variety which is resistant to the blight. I have visited one of the nurseries and have seen the third-generation trees, which have been crossed back three times to provide proportionally more of the American genes.
Volunteers pollinate the trees by hand, sometimes using a cherry picker truck from the local power company, and enclose each flower in a bag until the nuts form. 
There are still saplings that grow from the original chestnut trees in the mountains around here, and they can even grow large enough to produce nuts, but eventually they will succumb to the blight.

> On Nov 21, 2014, at 11:24 AM, James Oppenheimer-Crawford <oppenheimerjw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> This thread is gone to hades in a handbasket, so....
> 
> I read somewhere that they have come up with a strain of chestnut that is
> resistant to the chestnut blight.
> 
> James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
> *“If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better
> for people coming behind you, and you don’t do it, you're wasting your time
> on this Earth.”  -- *Roberto Clemente
> 
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <
> magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> In a message dated 11/20/2014 4:50:20 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
>> ichthys89 at comcast.net writes:
>> 
>> David  (and me, reading) were just reminiscing about Elms, thass all...
>> 
>> I had  two giant ones in the yard where I grew up.
>> 
>> It was curious when I went  to Amsterdam/The Netherlands in the 1990s,
>> there
>> were very large Elms all  over the place... I think Dr. David has discussed
>> this already too, but  I've forgot.
>> 
>> Lynn>>>>>
>> 
>> I don't have any foolproof answer to this observation.  There are  small
>> pockets of unaffected trees here and there in the previous ranges of
>> both the American and the European elms.  There have also been  some
>> hybridized elms that are supposed to be resistant to Dutch Elm  Disease.
>> 
>> I did observe that the British Isles, which had been spared the  earlier
>> destruction
>> seen on the continent of Europe, lost its elms in the 1970's about the
>> same
>> time as the disease was rampant in the Upper Midwest USA.
>> 
>> We see these man made epidemics one after another - Dutch Elm  Disease,
>> Chestnut Blight, Wooly adelgid (hemlocks), Emerald Ash Borer, White  Pine
>> Blister Rust - and wonder where it will all end.
>> 
>> 
>> David Strang.
>> 
>> 
>>