Welcome Back to the American Chestnut
“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” made sense when that Christmas carol was written: Chestnut trees represented a bountiful resource for early America. Then a fungal blight appeared in 1905 and wiped out virtually the entire American Chestnut population.
You can imagine the excitement, then, when volunteers found a stand of healthy American Chestnut trees near Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Little White House. Scientists at the American Chestnut Foundation have worked slowly to revive the native population, and this new find represents an untapped resource. They hope to use the pollen from the trees to strengthen the small stock of American Chestnut trees in the country. At the very least, they hope to research the area and determine how these trees survived.
