Tree-mendous Try:
Lions Help Restore Legendary American Chestnut
by Jay Copp

Lion Clint Neel of Tennessee remembers the moment that sparked his passion to help reverse an American ecological disaster. When he was in high school, he accompanied his father, a land surveyor, to a forest, where they came across stump after stump. “I asked him what these were. He said, ‘They were American chestnuts and they died in the 1930s.’ I decided then to find out a lot more about it.”

The American chestnut tree once dominated the forests from southern Appalachia to New England. It was so prevalent that it was said a squirrel could travel from Georgia to Maine without ever touching the ground. The chestnut was considered the perfect tree. It grew as high as 120 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter. It thrived even in poor soil and lived as long as 600 years. Its nuts provided plenty of nutritious sustenance for people and animals, and its straight-grained, rot-resistant wood was used for everything from fences and furniture to barns and utility poles.

But an accidentally imported fungus from Asia in the early 1900s spread like a biological wildfire and led to a catastrophe on par with the extinction of the passenger pigeon. By 1950, nearly every one of the 3.5 billion American chestnut trees in its native range was dead. Today the occasional chestnut that begins to sprout in a forest grows only a few feet tall before the blight destroys it.

Neel and some fellow Lions are part of an effort to restore the chestnut trees to the American forests by cross-pollinating the tree with the Chinese chestnut, which is disease resistant. Neel, 28, is the president of the Tennessee chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF).
Begun in 1983, TACF repeatedly crosses the Chinese and American chestnut trees to create a tree with American characteristics that is resistant to the disease. The first hybrid trees were one-half American and one-half Chinese. After six generations of breeding, TCAF now has trees that are 1/16 Chinese and 15/16 American. TCAF is nearing its goal to plant blight-resistant nuts in forests and let nature take its course.

Last spring, Neel and fellow Lions pollinated an American chestnut discovered on the property of a World War II veteran. The elderly man saw the familiar sharp-spined burrs on the ground and immediately knew a flowering chestnut tree was nearby. He called in a forester, who located it. The flowering American chestnut is one of only 20 such known trees in Tennessee.

The 65-foot-high tree is located in a thickly wooded area on a steep hillside near Woodbury. Gene Roberson, secretary of the Petersburg Lions club, hauled his bulldozer 60 miles to the site and cleared a road to the tree. He also created a level pad large enough to support a bucket lift. Also assisted by Lion Phillip McMillian, Neel used the lift to ascend near the treetop to tie 50 pollination bags to the tips of branches.

In the fall, the crew returned with a professional arborist to harvest 52 seeds. When the trees are seven years old, they will be tested for blight resistance and those that are most blight resistant will be crossbred.

The three Lions also are pollinating three other flowering area American chestnut trees. Additionally, Neel, an engineer from Nashville, maintains an orchard of 300 young chestnut trees on his father’s 340-acre cattle farm. Most of the trees are 1/16 to ½ Chinese. In a few years, he will inoculate the trees with the blight to discover the most hardy ones on his way to creating a blight-resistant tree that is 15/16 American.

Restoring the American chestnut rather than merely planting the Chinese chestnut has nothing to do with patriotic pride or even nostalgia, said Neel. Chinese chestnuts planted during the Great Depression are mostly gone now because they grow only 60-feet tall and cannot compete in the forest for light. “The Chinese tree is adapted to the forests of China, which are much shorter than those in eastern North America,” he said. “The America chestnut has a much straighter form, which creates the straight-grained lumber that the tree is famous for.”

But the aesthetic factor can’t be discounted either. “Call me prejudiced,” said Neel, “but I think the American chestnut is the most beautiful tree alive.”