My neighbor Julie gave us two baby American chestnut trees. They were adorably small, just twigs, each with a few tiny branches. And they were special, bred to be resistant to the blight that killed the great chestnut forests of the eastern United States. The American chestnut was said to be the perfect tree: strong, straight-grained, huge, and a prolific bearer of a tasty, highly nutritious nut. By the early 1900s an Asian blight had arrived in our eastern forests. Within 40 years it destroyed the native chestnut as a commercial species.
But now we had two, and the blight wouldn’t kill them! Unfortunately, something else well might. We selected a spot for them in our new yard, carefully planted them, and surrounded them with chicken wire fencing to keep deer from nibbling their little lives away. One succumbed anyway, just up and died for no obvious reason.
The second hung on. Its enclosure seemed ridiculously large, but I was taking no chances. Julie had three more, which she planted in her yard nearby. This was in mid-2019, back when the world seemed shinier, especially to us, new as we were to Maine.
During the previous 18 months we’d managed to move north, buy land, build a house, and begin our lives as New Englanders. Now we were planting trees in the old meadows we called home. Most we took from fields and hedgerows and groves too crowded for the youngest ever to prosper. We purchased a couple of sugar maples from a nursery, along with some rhododendrons for the yard. But we had so much pastureland begging for trees that we liberated as many as we could from sketchy habitat.
And now we had a chestnut. I tried to leave it alone (a watched chestnut never grows, right?) but found myself checking on it every day. It stood quietly in its enclosure, its long, slender, serrated leaves looking a bit yellow. I carefully applied some fertilizer—not too much, because of the tree’s small size. I made a point of passing by, saying hello, wishing it well.
What a long time ago that seems.
The chestnut grew the following summer, and the next. Its skinny little trunk split into two shoots, then three. Their crotches were only a few inches above the ground—not at all ideal—but I kept putting off the day when I’d trim them away. The tree still seemed so fragile! Its leaves continued to yellow unless I fed it frequently with a phosphorous compound. We tested the soil and found it to be of abysmal quality. Our land has been in farm field for a couple of centuries, and its rich topsoil long ago washed or blew away. All that remains is a mucky blue clay. So we began top dressing the ground around the chestnut with good soil. The yellowing in the leaves disappeared. The little tree fairly glowed.
I hoped Julie’s young chestnuts were doing well, and that hers and ours might cross-pollinate. But it turned out deer had gotten them. Ours was the lone tree standing.
We’d had a little apple orchard down south, and I’d learned through hard knocks not to fall in love with individual trees. Even so, I’d tip my heart to our chestnut on each morning walk. It grew, and our love for our new home grew. It seemed we were putting down roots together. The seasons turned. Toward the end of last summer I noticed a brown ball hanging from one branch, covered with painfully sharp spines. A burr! The chestnut’s first progeny! We resisted the urge to pick it. In early September it split open to reveal four tiny seeds inside. When it came easily loose from the branch, I gently carried it inside. It opened further. After a week I was able to extract the four seeds. They were too hard and tiny to eat—an adolescent’s first stab at procreation. But they were so beautiful!
I was telling a friend about the burr and how excited I was when she said, “It’s too bad all those trees have turned out not to be blight resistant.”
What???
It’s true: A widely distributed, supposedly blight-proof chestnut strain has been found to muster only a weak genetic response to the disease. Known as Darling 54s, these received their resistance from an inserted wheat gene, which (in addition to being rather worthless in combatting blight) makes them more susceptible to drought.
Is ours one? I don’t think I want to know.
I spent the next couple of weeks hurting a little whenever I passed our chestnut tree. Then I decided just to love it, to happily enjoy its presence and hope for the best.
We had snow for Christmas Eve and a few days beyond. The chestnut still held its leaves, though they were brown and dry and rattling. I sneaked away from the waiting chores and went skiing as much as I could, knowing that within days the snow would grow slushy and be washed away by rain—even in late December. This is new in Maine. Climate change is ratcheting up, and short of massive shifts in the world’s energy usage (which, face it, ain’t coming), all we can do is hang on and hope.
And oh, the world feels unsettled in so many ways! War in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in other places to which Americans pay less attention. Trade wars, drone wars, a deep political split in the U.S.: There’s an unencouraging sense of frailty to these times. That’s a sad word: “un-courage-inspiring,” in an era when we may need all the courage we can muster. Kindness too, and the willingness to accept the differences between us, while still pushing for what’s right.
So whenever I can, I’ll plant chestnuts. I’ll seek out the most blight-resistant strain, of course. I’ll plant chestnuts and rescue trees from overcrowded woodlots. I’ll work a little at the local food pantry and take whatever other steps I can to make this planet a better place. I’ll smile at people I don’t know. I’ll move carefully in a world that seems balanced on the head of a pin, gauging how best to work for goodness, and hoping, always hoping.
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