One man's dream: rebuilding the natural forest
By John Gever
For the Dominion Post
This year marks the centennial of one of the most important events in U.S. history, one that literally transformed the face of the nation. It is likely to pass unremarked except by a few dedicated individuals. There will be no speeches, film festivals or museum shows to commemorate the event.
It was in 1904 that the American chestnut blight first turned up on our shores. Within 50 years of its discovery in New York City, according to the American Chestnut Foundation, "the keystone species on some nine million acres of eastern forests had disappeared." West Virginia, whose forests are almost entirely hardwoods, was particularly hard hit.
But people old enough to remember the towering trees, and some who aren't, have held out hope that the species -- or at least something very much like it -- could ultimately be saved. Fortunately, the disease does not kill the tree's roots, which decades later still send up sprouts. Although these sprouts succumb to the disease as soon as they grow large enough to produce nuts, they're inspirational to die-hard forest-lovers.
Ed Hawkins, for example.
Hawkins, 56, lives on about 15 acres at the end of Easton Mill Road -- the remains of a 250-acre dairy farm that has been in his family since about 1900, but was carved up for U.S. Highway 48 (now Interstate 68) and state Route 857. After that, most of the leavings were sold off, including the present site of the Glenmark Center. But Hawkins has held onto the part that still features the original 1850 farmhouse and a barn that isn't much younger.
This is where Hawkins is trying to recreate the primeval forest, or some semblance of it, that once dominated the Appalachian region. Dominating that forest was the American chestnut.
In what is becoming a suburban area, Hawkins dreams of a forest replete with black walnut, beech, hickory, butternut, oaks, and of course chestnuts. He is not waiting for nature to grow it, since that would take decades, perhaps centuries, possibly never.
Standing on a hillside overlooking his house, he pointed to a fat tree with a big, round canopy, just beginning to turn yellow in the October chill. "You see that sycamore?" he asked, then shifted his gaze a hundred yards farther away. "And that one, and that one and that one?" The others, he said, are offspring of the big daddy sycamore in his front yard, grown from its airborne seeds.
He explained that the sycamores, maples and other trees whose seeds are carried by the wind quickly colonize open space like his farm, much better than nut-producers such as chestnuts. Deer and other critters eat most of the nuts, he said.
A 4-H member as a youth and an avid 4-H supporter ever since, Hawkins is taking the matter into his own hands, painstakingly planting and nurturing many types of native trees that have become rarities, at least in the second- and third-growth forests around Morgantown. It may be impossible to completely reproduce the original native forest ecology. But Hawkins hopes to at least approximate it by rearing the same mix of big trees that Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon saw in the 1760s.
"My passion is to see things preserved as much as I can," he said.
He has a special passion for the American chestnut, which was enormously important to the rural human economy, as well as the forest ecology. "It wasn't just chestnuts roasting on an open fire," Hawkins said. The nuts were important, of course: they could be eaten, sold for cash or fed to the hogs. But the timber was hugely valuable too. Mature American chestnuts often reached 100 feet in height, with a straight trunk five feet across. The wood was strong but lighter and more easily worked than oak. It was also highly rot resistant.
Hawkins pointed to the porch on the 1850 farmhouse next to his current, brick dwelling. Its support posts are chestnut, he said. He said his 80-year-old father (who still lives on another part of the original family property) couldn't remember the porch ever being replaced, suggesting it's probably original. The posts are dry and solid, as is the chestnut frame of the adjacent barn.
He holds out hope that, within his lifetime, chestnuts can be restored to West Virginia's woods -- with the Hawkins farm a good a place to start as any.
On his property stands another type of chestnut, originating in China, that may play a key role. It's about 30 feet tall with a nice round spread of leaves, underneath which is a carpet of empty husks. Before the deer got to them, he said, they contained a very edible nut, barely distinguishable from a real American chestnut. "They don't eat my hostas," the leafy flowering plant known as a great deer favorite, he joked. "There's so much else to eat here."
The Chinese chestnut is immune to the blight. But it doesn't grow tall or straight. So, in the eyes of Hawkins and other tree connoisseurs, it's not a satisfactory replacement.
What it might do, though, is contribute its genes to a breeding program aimed at creating a tall, straight, frost-tolerant hybrid. Researchers at several universities have been crossing Chinese chestnuts with their American cousins (from sprouts off old blight-killed stumps), hoping to combine the American growth pattern with Chinese blight resistance.
Hawkins has tried planting so-called Dunston hybrids, the result of an early breeding effort based in Florida, he said. "I have spent $500 trying to get these stinking trees to grow," he said, looking at the few spindly saplings that have survived. He said it appears that the trees' Floridian origins left them intolerant of cold weather -- a sample of what can go wrong in a breeding program.
At a research farm in Virginia, the American Chestnut Foundation is closing in on producing a hybrid tree whose genome is 15 parts American to one part Chinese -- the blight-resistant part. Foundation researchers are now watching the growth of their last crossing, completed in 2001. So far, it looks like they have succeeded in creating a blight-resistant, 15/16ths-American tree. Plantable offspring from that growth could be available as soon as 2006, a date Hawkins is eagerly awaiting.
The ACF program isn't the only effort to overcome the blight. Another, centered in Morgantown and closely watched around the nation, is a direct attack on the blight fungus.
Bill MacDonald, a WVU plant scientist, is developing a biological control agent to disable the fungus, based on a virus that naturally infects it. Unfortunately, he said, while the virus is contagious, it's not contagious enough to spread effectively in a forest setting. So he is working with people at the University of Maryland on an another tack: inserting the virus in the laboratory directly into the DNA of fungus cells.
Their lab studies indicate that the pre-infected fungus cells can still grow and reproduce, better than their natural cousins, in fact. However, thanks to the virus, "they don't kill trees," he said. The idea is to release the altered fungus into a forest, where it will drive out the disease-causing fungus. MacDonald said the group had started a field test in Pendleton County this summer. "It will be two to three years before we find out if they outcompete" the natural fungus in the wild, he said.
MacDonald said scientists elsewhere were looking at bacteria and other natural enemies of the fungus, as well as at ways to directly engineer blight resistance into American chestnut trees. However, he thought these efforts were farther way from final success.
Hawkins would be happy if any or all of these efforts pan out. "I want to see the timber," he said.