Spring 2006

CHESTNUTS AND BASEBALL BATS

Certain songs, and other familiar sounds, stir our deepest emotions. The opening line from Nat King Cole’s "The Christmas Song" is one such phrase. "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" evokes warmth, comfort and safety even though most of us have never seen an American chestnut tree or roasted chestnuts.

The American chestnut tree (Castanea dentate) was once pervasive in the great eastern forest, from Maine to Florida and North Carolina to Western Tennessee. In Indiana, the American chestnut followed sandstone-based soils up from the Ohio River into the Brown County Hills area. Native wildlife, from passenger pigeons to black bears, feasted on the abundant crop of nutritious chestnuts. Before 1900, people depended on the tree for nuts, livestock forage, tannin and just about every imaginable wood product. The wood of American chestnut is straight-grained, light, easily worked, and as rot resistant as redwood.

In a period of only 40 years, this majestic tree was wiped out across its entire range by the chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica). The fungus entered the United States on Asian nursery stock imported to New York around 1900. It spread by wind, rain, birds and other animals (including people). Once it entered American chestnut trees through cracks in the bark, the fungus quickly killed them. Typically the tree would die within one growing season. By 1940 the American chestnut was devastated. A few American chestnuts and stump sprouts from trees killed 60 - 80 years ago still persist in the understory of some eastern forests, but for our generation, roasting chestnuts on an open fire is nothing but a comforting phrase.

Another exhilarating sound is the "crack" of a baseball against a wooden bat. This sound is even familiar to people who could care less about baseball. The most popular wood for making baseball bats is White Ash (Fraxinus americana). White Ash is light, durable and strong - qualities that are important not only for baseball bats, but internal furniture parts, cabinets, clothes pins and a multitude of other wood products.

Right now all Ash species are facing the same fate as the American chestnut. A wood boring beetle from Asia, the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) (Agrilus planipennis) came into the US about 10 years ago on solid wood packing material. Since that time it has spread out across Michigan, Canada, Ohio and Indiana. The EAB appears to kill all members of the Ash Family, since none of our native ashes have any built-in resistance. Worse still, many of the beetles predators, parasites and diseases that keep EAB populations low in Asia are not present in North America. Recent efforts to remove and destroy all ash trees in a C mile radius around known infestations have proven ineffective. There are still efforts to quarantine areas to slow the spread of the beetle, but over time the dusty purple shades of ash trees in fall may disappear from the Indiana landscape.

This doesn't mean we must give up hope for Ash trees or the American chestnut. There are efforts underway to collect Ash tree genetic material, establish seed banks, and develop EAB resistant ash seedlings for the future. Researchers continue to search for pesticides that may help protect some of the native Ash trees. When the chestnut blight ripped across the eastern US, the technology was not available to capture genetic material or seed bank samples. However, The American Chestnut Foundation has been working diligently for the past 21 years to breed a blight-resistant American chestnut. Within the next few years, a highly blight resistant American chestnut will be available to plant. It will be 15/16 American chestnut and 1/16 Chinese chestnut. The tree will have the form, grandeur, and mast production of an American chestnut with the blight resistance of a Chinese chestnut.

Hopefully, in time, American chestnut will grace Indiana's hillsides with showy white blossoms in spring and abundant mast for wildlife. With luck, ash trees will never completely disappear from Indiana. But what species is next? We all need to do our part to control the spread of invasive species. The songs and sounds of our history depend on it.

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