It has been a wet Fall around Paris. Running through the forest on my weekly jog last Sunday, it felt as if the moisture had transformed the place into a quasi rainforest. Pounding the trails, I could sense that the moisture had expanded the organic material underfoot; it felt like running on cork. The forest smelled of decaying wood, a rich, fecund smell. As I ran along, the occasional chestnut would fall. I cruised past three fellows from eastern Europe (well, speaking a Slavic language, anyhow) collecting chestnuts in sacks. Further down the trail, I spied some other folks rummaging through the underbrush in search of these edible nuts.

According to the French National Forest Office, chestnut trees make up about 50% of the forest in our area. These trees are an important part of the fabric of the place. In part of our forest they are cultivated and eventually cut, in other places they are protected. On sunny days, people come out to stroll on forest paths under their branches, particularly from the time of flowering in the Spring until it is time to collect and eat the nuts in the Fall. Our daughters, too, sometimes collected and roasted the nuts. (We discovered that if you don’t pierce the shell adequately, the chestnuts explode upon roasting.) Year round, one finds joggers, hikers and bikers out communing with the chestnut trees.

When my kids were young, we were walking through the forest near our home and came across a chestnut nut that had sprouted. We brought it home and planted it in a pot. Soon the nut was a small tree. Now, ten or twelve years later that tree has gone through several pots and is in the biggest size pot that we’ll tolerate in our garden. It is a sort of large bonsai. The tree fits nicely in our garden, standing about two meters (>6 feet) tall, but constrained by the size of the pot. Each spring it happily flowers and makes me smile. Unfortunately, the joy of chestnuts is now missing from much of the US forestland.

In the eastern US, the chestnut tree used to make up a large part of the forest (ca. 25% in 1900), but a blight accidentally imported from China struck. By the 1940s, most of the trees were wiped out or stunted. These fast growing and long-lived trees had been a major source of food for wildlife and people, as well as providing durable, rot-resistant wood for construction. It is hard to imagine the tremendous extent of the loss from the blight, but it is clear that it transformed the eastern US woodlands.

Yet, all is not lost. The American Chestnut Foundation is working to develop new hybrid chestnut trees that can resist the ravages of the blight. They are cross-breeding some resistance from Chinese chestnuts into the American variety, while preserving as much as 95% of the original characteristics of the American tree. Some of the work is being done near Sugarloaf Mountain in Maryland, not far from the junction of the Monocacy and Potomac Rivers and a favorite hiking area for me back when I lived in Maryland. A breeding program is underway there. For the moment the chestnut tree remains largely absent from the US forests, but perhaps one day conditions will enable it to resume its natural place in American life.

American Chestnut                    © Michael Zmasser-Drexler, Shutterstock.com