[Magdalen] Nature goes tee hee

[Charles Wohlers]

-----Original Message----- 
From: Grace Cangialosi
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2014 10:10 PM
To: magdalen at herberthouse.org
Subject: Re: [Magdalen] Nature goes tee hee

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.


These small chestnut trees are quite common in Massachusetts also, but, as 
you say, they never get very big. They keep sprouting from the roots, which 
the blight does not kill.


Chad Wohlers
Woodbury, VT USA
chadwohl at satucket.com