New American Chestnuts

Plainfield mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs will honor the American chestnut at 946 Madison Avenue at the City's Arbor Day celebration Friday April 24.

The tree was planted by Bill Santoriello in 1992 and is now about 10 inches in diameter at breast height. The tree is currently owned by Vicki Blasucci. Lacking a nearby chestnut to pollinate it, the Madison Avenue chestnut has been sterile. But things are looking up for the tree. It will soon have neighbors. The American Chestnut Foundation provided germinated nuts for planting new trees nearby. Bill Santoriello, Vicki Blasucci, and Robin Gates planted four of the nuts this past weekend, two on Vicki's property and two on Bill's, which backs on Vicki's. The nuts are the progeny of a 19" diameter chestnut in Middletown (which was pictured in Plainfield Trees November 21, 2008.) One of the tree's nuts, with newly formed rootlet, is shown below.

The plantings were done with concern for chestnut blight at the forefront. The Madison Avenue chestnut is quite unusual in being absolutely untouched by blight. The last thing anyone wanted was to introduce blight to Madison Avenue with the planting of infected new trees.

Extraordinary measures were taken. First, nuts were planted instead of seedling trees. Why? Unlike seedlings, nuts are extremely unlikely to harbor blight. Second, plant protectors, needed to shelter the tender new trees from predatory deer, were virgin. Sterilizing previously used ones wasn't good enough for us worrywarts. Tony Rosati, a Chestnut Foundation volunteer from Monmouth County, drove out to Hightstown to acquire new ones for use in Plainfield. Third, the nuts were planted only in very close proximity to the Madison Avenue tree. Why? Blight fungi spread on the wind from tree to tree and can also be carried by birds and insects. Spreading chestnut trees around Plainfield could create blight "waystations" that would allow spread of the disease to the Madison Avenue tree.

With luck the new trees might begin flowering in five or six years and cross-pollinate the existing tree so that they can all produce chestnuts. Let's wish them luck.

Chestnut esoterica:
Crown gall, a disease that affects numerous plant species, is caused by Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The name of the bacterium is as ugly as the disease itself, which is pictured below.

I encountered this disease last fall when I bought some hollies to plant on Martha's Vineyard. When I took the hollies out of their pots and "roughed up" their roots for planting, I saw warty, tumor-like growths at the tree bases.

I sent a photograph to American Holly Society trustee Charles Wiley, owner of Vineyard Gardens(1) in West Tisbury MA, who diagnosed crown gall. The disease-causing bacteria enter the plant through a wound near the base of the trunk. The bacteria then engage in genetic engineering. They insert genes into the plant cells that cause the cells to grow rapidly, producing an ugly, tumor-like gall at the tree base. The cells of the gall generate unusual amino acids that are useless to the plant but nourish the bacteria.

What does all of this have to do with chestnut blight? The thuggish bacterial genetic engineers can be co-opted and turned into model citizens. Adopting a technique called Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, researchers at SUNY Syracuse modify the gall bacteria to make them helpful to chestnuts. The scientists replace the genes that direct gall production with genes that are known to be associated with fungus-resistance in some plant species. The modified gall bacteria are then mixed with chestnut embryos. When the modified bacteria inject the chestnut cells, the embryos acquire new genetic material that might help combat chestnut blight. A exciting line of research. See http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/tissue%20culture.htm for more details. (2)

(1) For the record, Vineyard Gardens, a top-notch plant nursery on Martha's Vineyard owned by Charles and Chris Wiley, was not the seller of the infected plants. Having plants infected with crown gall in one's garden is to be avoided. The bacteria persist in the soil and can spread to other plants.

(2) Many thanks to Sara Fitzsimmons of The American Chestnut Foundation and Pennsylvania State University for educating me about Agrobacterium-mediated transformation research on chestnut blight.

Copyright Gregory Palermo

American chestnut

Needed: a photograph of an American chestnut to be enlarged to a height of two stories for a museum exhibit about chestnut trees and the Appalachian mountains. Where do you suppose the paragon of chestnuthood worthy of such photographic extravagance was found? Why, suburban New Jersey, of course. The photogenic chestnut is shown below with its discoverer, Tony Rosati, and his border collie, Jessie. The tree is 19" in diameter at chest height and is next to a path through the woods behind the Middletown Public Library. Mr. Rosati discovered the tree a few years ago while he was strolling in the woods with Jessie, just killing time while waiting for a canine agility training course.

The black discolorations on the tree's bark are the result of chestnut blight. More detail of chestnut blight injury can be seen in the photographs in Note 4.

Tony Rosati was in Plainfield a few weeks ago to visit our own American chestnut, a 10" diameter tree at 946 Madison Avenue. The tree was planted in 1992 by Bill Santoriello and is now owned by Vicki Blasucci. Robin Gates wrote to report on the existence of this tree as a correction to my September 2007 blog posting on chestnuts ( http://plainfieldtrees.blogspot.com/2007/09/chestnuts.html ). My posting had made the (seemingly safe, but erroneous) assertion that one probably had to leave Plainfield to see an American chestnut.

The Madison Avenue chestnut has become a star. Someone posted forty photographs of the tree on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/njheart2heart/sets/72157609014062777/ . Members of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation are interested in the tree because it has reached a considerable size(1) in good health and with a graceful shape. Past president of the chapter Bob Summersgill recently visited the Madison Avenue chestnut. He concluded from a quick inspection that there were no other chestnuts in the vicinity. How did he know that? He had two important clues. First, the tree had no injury from chestnut blight, which it almost surely would have had if there had been a nearby chestnut to transmit the infection. Second, the tree was producing only sterile burs, lacking a nearby chestnut to serve as a pollinator. Mr. Summersgill showed me the papery "non-nuts" inside the unfertilized burs (pictured below).

Unfertilized chestnut bur with papery, brown "non-nuts" in the center. Even the squirrels have no use for them.

Rosati and Summersgill have great hopes for the Madison Avenue chestnut. They would like to provide pollen for the tree so that it can reproduce. The flowers could be hand-pollinated with pollen from another chestnut. Alternatively, blight-free chestnut seedlings could be planted nearby, and the wind could do the work of pollination.

Rosati and Summersgill's work was featured in the October 9 edition of the Star-Ledger.(2) The article focused on American chestnuts in the Monmouth County parks, some of the best surviving examples of the species in the eastern United States. Volunteer workers hand-pollinate the chestnut flowers in the spring, bag the flowers to keep out other pollen, and harvest the resultant bagged chestnuts in the fall. This is not work for the faint of heart. Chestnuts only produce flowers on branches that are exposed to the sun. For a tree in the woods, that means the top branches only. The volunteers go up as high as 75 feet in a cherry-picker to accomplish their mission.

But this is New Jersey; there must be another twist to this story. What do the chestnut harvesters do with the chestnuts that they collect? They plant some of them in the garden of Vito Genovese, (now Deep Cut Gardens, part of the Monmouth County parks system, the garden was created by Vito Genovese). Yes, that Vito Genovese. Reputed to be the convener of the ill-fated 1957 mob conference in Apalachin New York, Vito Genovese is also said to be the man who ordered the barbershop assassination of Murder, Incorporated's Albert Anastasia.(3) When Mr. Rosati took me to visit the little chestnut nursery at beautiful and peaceful Deep Cut Gardens, I could sense the spirit of Vito Genovese watching over the tender saplings and frightening off predatory deer.(4)

(1) A considerable size by the standards of today. American chestnuts used to mature at trunk diameters many times the size of the Madison Avenue tree's.

(2) http://www.acf.org/pdfs/news/2008/LastStandForTheOldChestnut.pdf
The Monmouth County chestnut work cited in the article is a collaborative effort involving the Monmouth County Park System, The Monmouth County Shade Tree Commission, the Middletown Parks and Recreation Department, and the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation.

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Genovese

(4) American chestnuts are sometimes able to survive chestnut blight until they're old enough to produce nuts. In addition, the stumps of fallen chestnuts send up new shoots that mature to bear nuts. All other things being equal, the species might presumably limp along that way until it develops resistance to chestnut blight through genetic mutation. The explosion of the deer population has placed another obstacle in the way of hopes that the species will escape extinction, however. Deer are very willing to eat chestnut shoots.

While I can't claim to keep up with the research, I know of several avenues along which workers hope to develop blight-resistant American chestnuts. 1. Breeding the Chinese chestnut's resistance into American chestnuts. The American Chestnut Foundation has a program that crosses Chinese chestnuts with Americans to confer resistance and then "backcrosses" the progeny with Americans over several generations to dilute out the Chinese characteristics while maintaining the blight resistance. 2. Other researchers are using molecular techniques to decipher and/or modify chestnut DNA. 3. Hypovirulence: weakening of the chestnut blight fungus with an antifungal virus. 4. Natural resistance. It's not clear why Monmouth County's parks have American chestnuts that survive better than American chestnuts elsewhere. Perhaps they have evolved some measure of blight resistance. It's just possible that Tony Rosati and coworkers will produce a highly blight-resistant strain in their little chestnut nursery in Deep Cut Gardens. If they do, I will lobby hard to persuade them to name it Castanea dentata 'Vito Genovese'.

The blackened areas on the trunk pictured above are the sequelae of chestnut blight.

Damage from chestnut blight at the tree base.

Damage from chestnut blight

Copyright Gregory Palermo

Poised to inherit the earth: red maples

Red maples are poised to inherit the earth. The sad facts of this change in the fortunes of red maples were laid out by William K. Stevens in a beautifully written article in the New York Times in 1999.(1) As Mr. Stevens tells the story, red maples, aided and abetted by humans, are taking over the forests of the eastern Unites States, displacing oaks as the dominant species.

Plainfield has numerous red maples (Acer rubrum) as street trees. They're most easily spotted in the spring when their early-blooming bright red flowers catch your eye as you pass.

Red maples are also noticeable in the fall, as their foliage turns red or orange before dropping. The trees can be distinguished easily from the other maples likely to be seen in the area. Unlike sugar or Norway maples, red maple leaves usually have only three lobes, not five. Another clue is their red color: red maple leafstalks, buds, samaras (winged seed cases), and flowers all have some red color. Colorful spring flowers and autumn leaves make for an attractive tree. Red maples' biggest problem is a tendency to split in strong winds, a drawback that it shares with several other maple species.

They are also susceptible to heart rot, leading to wind-snapped trunks.(2)

How are people helping red maples usurp the dominant role in eastern forests? In a multitude of ways. European settlers started the process by cutting down all but about two percent of the eastern forests' trees to make farms. Farming moved westward, and eastern farms were largely left to revert to forest by the early twentieth century. Red maples, although usually inhabitants of wet soils, were very adaptable opportunists.(3) They quickly inserted themselves into the newly open spaces.

Oaks and hickories have thick bark that protects them against forest fires. Thin-skinned red maples are much more likely to be killed to the ground by fires. Modern humans almost completely suppressed forest fires, stripping oaks and hickories of their natural advantage over red maples. Fire suppression had a second effect on the tree balance. Fires created open spaces ideal for light-loving oak seedlings. Maple seedlings are much more shade-tolerant than oaks and thrive in the darker environment created by fire suppression.

We did another favor for red maples by making the landscape very friendly to deer. Vastly expanded deer populations suppress oak numbers by eating huge quantities of acorns.

Yet another boon to red maples was our importation of gypsy moths, prodigious eaters of oak leaves. We also introduced Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight, dealing a knockout blow to other red maple competitors. Finally, there is evidence that red maples are more tolerant of acid rain than most tree species. Man's best friend? Dog. Red maple's best friend? Man.

More on chestnuts: Plainfield has a native American!

Robin Gates wrote that we have an American chestnut in Plainfield. You don't have to trek to Monmouth County to see one. Bill Santoriello planted one at 946 Madison Avenue when he owned that property in 1992. The tree was obtained from The American Chestnut Foundation and is now eight or nine inches in diameter at breast height.

Although the tree will eventually succumb to chestnut blight, it might live a long time. A stand of 200 native chestnut trees about 80 years of age was recently discovered in Georgia (4)

The Plainfield tree recently produced a large crop of chestnuts.

Click on photograph to enlarge.

(1) William K. Stevens, Eastern Forests Change Color as Red Maples Proliferate, New York Times, October 22, 1999.

(2) Charles Fergus, Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, Stackpole Books 2002, p. 199.

(3) "Red maple can probably thrive on a wider range of soil types, textures, moisture, pH, and elevation than any other forest species in North America." Russell S. Walters and Harry S. Yawney, Red Maple, in Silvics of North America, U.S. Forest Service, http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/acer/rubrum.htm

(4) The American Chestnut Foundation

Copyright Gregory Palermo