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In the late 1800s , when the American chestnut ( Castanea dentata ) reigned in Eastern forest , the tree diagram was a symbol of national identicalness . Log cabins were built from its baseball bat , Christmas carol celebrated its en " roast on an open fire , " and the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree dominated the landscape . At the turn of the 100 , an estimated 4 billion American chestnut trees filled a quarter of forests in the Eastern United States . Over the next C , however , the American chestnut fell victim to a foreign blight and the iconic tree intimately disappeared .
pic by : cooperativeconservation.org
American chestnut tree population were disclose to the disease around 1904 , with the initiation of several Chinese chestnut tree diagram that carried the blight — a computer virus that survives in the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ’s theme and prevent the tree diagram from mature . Within 50 years the fungus had infected and kill most of the American chestnut trees from Georgia to Maine , run through the forests of Appalachia .
The story is n’t over . The bad news : The pathogenic computer virus remains a threat , and has not been control . The ripe news : The American chestnut tree has not gone extinct , and sure as shooting not forgotten . In the past decades , botanist have initiated efforts to revive the coinage , breeding disease - resistant cross that could hopefully repopulate depleted forest . At least 50 form of the fungus have been identified , and theChinese chestnut treesthat infix them are resistant to all of them . A principal tactics has been breeding American chestnut tree trees with Formosan chestnut trees , hoping to render the American tree blight - resistant .
" Mighty Giants " Timber warden E.B. King ( left ) and timber agent D.W. Swan amid chestnut tree trees in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina around 1910 . Photo by : Sidney V. Streator . Courtesy of : Forest History Society .
In 2012 , scientistsplanteda mathematical group of genetically - engineered American chestnut tree trees . Grown with a wheat - derive gene that is believed to increase resistance to the pathogen , the Tree were the culmination of a twenty - twelvemonth effort to develop a executable unexampled tree diagram . The location was symbolically notable — a site at The New York Botanical Garden , very close to where the fungus was first discovered . " We ’re very excited to be go back to the New York Botanical Garden because that ’s a stone ’s throw , literally across the street , from where the blight was discovered in 1904 , " enjoin Dr. Charles Maynard , a scientist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science an Forestry . At the April 18 , 2012 , ceremony in the Bronx , Maynard and SUNY - ESF colleague Dr William Powell , curry in cause , knelt in the soil to implant the young trial trees .
The American chestnut planted at the New York Botanical Garden are among more than 100 varieties that scientists are gradually introducing into test gardens . It ’ll be about 50 year before we ’ll know whether the young trees will be resistive to the blight . Many country are initiating their own training syllabus — check out theAmerican Chestnut Foundationfor newsworthiness . And find fault up Susan Freinkel’sAmerican Chestnut : The Life , Death , and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree . The book ’s title tells it all — pages of history and anecdotes debate that the tree is — to borrow its classic parlance — no " erstwhile chestnut . "
