Woodland Walk and Talk - Recovering The American Chestnut

hello i'm neil dunning i'm a member of the brant county woodlotters association and we are one of the chapters of the ontario woodlot association we're in brant county brantford alderman and some parts of hamilton as well today i'm going to introduce you to [Music] our walk and talk with ron casir and the subject is the american chestnut so right now i'm at the woodlot that my wife and i bought in 2001 it's in brant county in an area known as the oakland swamp we are very fortunate to discover that we have one american chestnut tree the american chestnut is a tree that once grew in huge numbers from southern ontario right down to georgia through eastern north america it was very important for lumber both for carpentry and for the fact that it was rot resistant and was great for things like posts also i'm just gonna stop to go over a fallen tree here we had a big windstorm in southern ontario yesterday also the american chestnut produced huge amount of amounts of nuts which were eaten by wildlife and by people are first nations people and settlers as well unfortunately a blight came to north america and wiped out most of our chestnut trees by well the 1930s or so i think most of the chestnuts were gone and these trees grew to huge sizes if you ever see a picture online uh there's some pictures online with people in front of the tree and they're just immense trees anyway the blight doesn't kill the roots of the tree so the tree is able to re-sprout and that's believed to be a reason why there are some of the remnants that we have so now we're at the area of my woodlot where the chestnut is these are some chestnut saplings i'll tell you about those in a moment this is the american chest in here let me show you the bark to start with and there's the tree it's about 40 feet tall quite healthy no signs of sprouts coming out of the stump and usually when sprouts start coming out that means the tree's under stress under stress there are no cankers on it and the bark is clean so so far so good that's one of the leaves of the american chestnut and we'll be having a closer look at at the leaves later so these are five small saplings you can see the guards and these are part of what's called the breaking isolation project and you'll be hearing more about that later in the video we're at the farm of ron kazeer who's with the elgin middlesex chapter of the owa also ron is the ch chair of the canadian chestnut council and i'm a board member so i thought it'd be really great to come out here and learn about what the canadian chessup council is doing at ron's farm you can see behind ron here is a research orchard and ron can you tell us a bit about it okay well welcome everyone so this research um orchard was established back in 2011 and it's one of our it is our smallest research station our larger one is at um onodega farms at the tim hortons children's camp in brant county um so this consists of approximately one acre with about approximately two thousand american chestnut there's pure american there's some hybrids there's also some control trees like chinese and european as part of the research process and so these are all second generation trees so they've been back crossed at least once um from the original parents and so we can these trees get to a certain size and then we inoculate them and i can show you some inoculation so that and see what the results that we're trying to achieve here so um this tree here is approximately five years old it's reached its um about two inches in diameter and you can see here and here we've made a small opening and we insert a plug of inoculum which is contains the actual blight we put the weaker blade on the bottom and the stronger blade on the top and then we look for a reaction now you can see here this orange area and sunken area that is the blight infection and so we monitor these up to three years to see how the tree responds right now this tree is showing no response to fight off the infection but again in canada here we have a shorter growing season and therefore the tree has a shorter time spent so that's why we take up to three years before we decide whether a tree is kept in the breeding program or not so what we have here is a tree that was tested six years ago and you can see that the original mark for the boar is still there the disease has kept spreading but you can see this tree has tried some response this callus that's formed here and under the bark on this side but you know you notice that the blade has eaten its way around but this is one of the trees mechanisms but you can see the blade is moving down the trunk so this has a tree has immunity or has resistance in that it can keep the blade from spreading around the tree laterally but not vertically and so this tree has is of interest and it is surviving it's also fighting off uh natural occurring blight infections but it's not necessarily a tree that we're interested in because it's not showing we want trees that form a complete callus so we've got another example over here so in this example you can see the callus is very massive and it's come around split over the bark here and that's actually new bark growing back yeah that's new bark growing back and so we see another example here now this is a tree of interest it's also from six years ago but it's showing a much stronger resistance and what we found in nature trees that show this sort of resistance over time that scar will close there's a tree at riverbend that had a scar that was at least two and a half feet long and probably six inches wide and you can see where the tree has closed up and it's surviving every other american chestnut planted around it has died from the blight in that spring water conservation authority there is a younger tree whose scar is like one inch wide and about 12 feet long but it's slowly healing so again those are the trees that we want to pass on to our breeding program now this tree hasn't been even though it's six years we haven't passed it into the breeding program yet we're still seeing looking for better results and that so in i mentioned earlier that there were about 2 000 trees here genetic-wise and statistic-wise if i-5 we find 10 trees out of the 2000 that have resistance that's what the odds are so when i established this plot i knew that eventually i'd end up with an empty field with 10 trees so but we're coming along things are um and this tree again it's showing a natural blight or natural infection here and again it's healing it off so again this tree may prove to be and the nice thing about this tree you'll notice that it grows nice and straight and it forms a timber would form a good timber tree and i know the blight infection here is quite but ugly and that would impact the formation of the log but again this tree would be crossed with another f2 to create our f3s and back in 1920 or in 2020 we planted our first f3s out and so now we've got about um we've got three years of f3s and we're expecting our f3s to show a high degree of resistance if not total resistance so this is a time for me ron as a board member to get some education what does f2 and f3 stand for f2 and f3 is referring to the generation so the original trees that we took from the original 26 families we started with male and female we crossed them and that produced the first generation of crosses so the 26 families that were chosen were wild native american chestnuts that were still surviving and therefore had somehow survived blight on any possible re-inflection a reinfection um from back well blight went through here in about 1924. so they instead stood the test of time from then we get our f1s our f1s were grown up in research plots like this and then they were tested with inoculum and the survivors from those tests the best ones that showed the most resistance we cross them to make the f2 so you get a nursery like this and from this f2 we're now testing and from the best trees in here we'll produce our f3s so are there any f3s yet yes there are f3s at onodega farms but not here yet okay our f3s are being planted in isolated plots because we want to make sure that we keep concentrating the genes for resistance into the best trees and we don't want it to be diluted out again so the program is trying to concentrate we originally believed there were three genes involved with resistance now there's possibly a fourth so we've got to keep those four concentrated we suspect that our native trees have one or two of the resistant genes we're just trying to bring them together into a collection of trees that will show all four genes and then the blight will have been defeated so four genes that will give complete resistance yeah wow so the genes we're looking at are genes that produce this callus there are genes that resist chemically resist the blade getting into through the bark at all and there's probably other resistant genes but those are the ones that we're kind of concentrated on but we'll also look at the other factor we're looking at again is hypovirulence which saved the european chestnut hypovirulence is a virus that you give to the tree infect the tree with and the virus gives the blight the flu for a better example and therefore the weakened blight the resistance in the tree can fly off the blade and push the blade out of it so in north america here we tried about 30 years ago with hypovirulence and there didn't seem to be much results but our survey in 2014 showed that there are three trees showing hypo virulence one of them is just here in central elgin as well and so we've reopened the investigation the problem with hypovirulence here in north america is in europe they were dealing with five to six strains of blight here in north america we're with 200 plus forms of blight wow so we have to come up with 200 plus forms of virus to help fight this out but it's an area that we're going to reopen and reinvestigate um it may take some time but it gives us another it's a a bio control on the blight but again it's something you put in your toolbox to help fight the blight to preserve the tree when you inoculate these trees with blight is it how many types of blade are in the inoculum we use two different we use a a low virulent strain and a high virulence strain so that's why there's two thing because we want to see can we get some resistance through using just low levels of or low mortality and high mortality so it's a test here and you can see the high mortality one here the trees had more difficulty not as bad here but again the scientists haven't chosen this tree um looking for something better because of course doing this program takes a lot of time and a lot of money so here's an inoculation test that's completely field failed you can see there's the puncture there's the puncture notice that the orange of the blight has spread and the tree has made no attempt or a very minimum attempt to survive and so you can see this tree is now dead now the sucker is alive because of course blight will not go through the root system so the one amazing thing about american chestnut is if the main trunk dies and there's sufficient sunlight the root caller will send up additional branches and try to create another tree and so you get this regeneration so a stump can last for a long long time and so we find the biggest problem with this is that as the forest canopy closes in eventually the stump gets shaded out and it can't regenerate that and so the tree is lost but that that's actually the regeneration ability from the stump is partly what has saved the american chestnut oh most definitely we have a number of locations here in central elgin uh where there are small groupings of chestnuts that have survived that way uh but in a forest situation we've run into a thing of we need to do forest management around these older chestnuts so that they don't get shaded out because chestnut is a mid tolerant to shade so they won't survive under complete shade okay so just show you another example here inoculation site inoculation site you can see typical sinking but notice the heavy callusing that's formed here and this is a much smaller girth tree but it's making a fairly strong response which is what we're looking for and it has also got a number of natural infections so again this is a tree of interest we have to see how long it survives now and it may be a tree for consideration for the breeding program to be incorporated into and see here this tree next to it it's gotten a natural infection and it is on its way out in fact it's completely dead already i can tell yep it's dead so in the research plot mother nature does help us by removing trees that have no resistance and so that helps speed speed up the the testing and so you'll see trees any gaps in the the planting are trees that have been removed because they have shown no resistance these trees go right down to georgia don't they oh yeah and the interesting thing is uh recent uh the recent research has shown that our trees here in ontario have more genetic commonality with the trees in georgia than they do with the trees in ohio or new york pennsylvania or even the ones up in north the northeastern states we're completely distinct from the appalachia and more research is showing that we the population here is very genetically very distinct and unique separated from its american counterparts which has drawn more importance to preserving our genome here so it's very set to its our climate and the neat thing about that is that we're finding that the original boundary was from basically grand bend to oakville south of that on the north shore of lake erie but we now know we can grow american chestnut and produce viable nuts as far north as sault ste marie and at north bay so this tree will migrate northward with climate change and it's very suited to the canadian environment so that's another reason why we want to preserve uh the tree how did we end up with the same genome as georgia probably how the tree migrated northwards either the canadian tree has been isolated for much longer and has done its own mute or mutated in its own fashion or there's another migration route that has disappeared like there's no intervening trees yeah so somehow the trees came up the mississippi valley rather than the appalachia route and who knows but again it's pure speculation what is the maintenance on this orchard um getting it established was probably the hardest part in the first year at first three years i watered by hand all these trees at least once a week because of course the year we plant it's the year we had a drought here in this area so watering part of the thing we did here is we plant it with plastic so that helped with weed control but it meant mowing the in between here originally there was grass but now with the shade it's turned to moss but this gets mowed once a week i do go around and spray weeds to keep it out of the plastic taking out dead trees and in late june we do i do hand fertilize these the other thing is you come in and destroy gypsy moths egg casings there's a fair bit of manual stuff uh here because it's only an acre it takes up a good chunk of my time now onodega where we've got probably closer to 15 to 20 acres it's much more difficult to manage the areas but yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of manual work watering is the biggest thing now it's mainly keeping the weeds down uh taking out other things that are trying to because it's a little bit of a forest situation so mulberry like moving in dogwoods a lot of stuff wants to grow and so you uh spend time getting rid of trees that aren't supposed to be in the research plot and it's just a thing of cleaning up um and then otherwise it's a it's a labor of love and that so it's worth doing it's if i can save the tree were the gypsy moths bad this year um not this year was about four years ago five years ago they were horrendous in here but i discovered something baltimore orioles loved gypsy moth and so i encouraged the baltimore i put out grape jelly and oranges and it draws in the baltimore orioles or northern orioles i guess that's the proper term now um and they seem to i haven't had a problem here since then so that's one of the things the other things that i do leave nuts on the ground and that brings in the turkey turkey root around in here and that controls the greater and lesser chestnut weevil because one year we had weevil very badly in the in dig into the nuts and that they dig into the nuts and ruin it but the weevils spend their pupil stage in the ground and so with the wild turkey coming in now they clean up the floor and i haven't had a weevil problem now so that's part of that that part of nature and uh i know the local hunters are always very keen on the fact that this draw is turkey but i've had a flock as big as 27 birds in here and it's only an acre yeah and this year this year i had a grouping of probably six or seven and they i could hear them in here in the morning and that evening but it also makes it a challenge if you want to get nuts i've got to come out four or five times a day and hand pick otherwise in the morning everything is gone and you need the nuts for the breeding program well nuts for the breeding program but just even nuts to for display and even for consumption and that the other thing of course being close to my own wood lot here the squirrels have discovered this now there's a benefit to that and that the squirrels carry off nuts into the neighboring woodlots mine and the ones across the road and so in the long run it's dispersing the seed out there and you never know mother nature may have crossed the right two trees together right and create that tree you want and it's growing out in the wild we find that at onondega almost all the woodlots surrounding on a day have amer young american chestnuts coming up now and so one of them may hold the secret or the cure that we're looking for so that's always and again and that's why we've promoted we have in the last uh five or six years we now have 39 gene conservation seed colonies planted out on public land with conservation authorities and with land trusts and what these consist of anywhere from 150 to 200 trees planet in a block and from that once they reach sexual maturity they will start cross-pollinating with each other and produce nuts which will help the local wildlife but in the same time it spreads out that genetic combinations out into the neighboring forested areas and so you get a re-establishment of the chestnut in the wild and what we're doing is now the blight may come in and eliminate all some of those trees but we're hoping to get to the fruiting stage and so that will allow for a recombination of the genetics and again mother nature might throw out the trees that we need to find and so it expands our program the other program we're running are doing is we've now established 61 trees with breaking isolation these are trees that are isolated and chestnut needs two to tango so it's not self-pollinated so these trees have stood the test of time haven't produced nuts in well over a hundred years now and what they're lacking is a partner so what we've done is plant anywhere from eight to twelve partners in the immediate vicinity of this mother tree and the idea being that once they can pollinate each other they will do recombination and start producing nuts and so the process that's been developed to speed up the reproduction reproductionist is called ethylated grafting and we take mature sign or cuttings from a mature flowering tree and it's grafted onto the undifferentiated plume of a seed seed that's been germinated in the dark and those two graft together and that resulting grafted tree will flower in its second year sometimes in its first year so what we've done is we've shortened the reproductive stage probably by about 14 years and so these young grafted trees will start throwing pollen out the mother tree will be raining pollen down on them and so they'll be able to start producing nuts and that gives a recombination it also gives us a chance to preserve these trees in the wild that otherwise would probably die of old age and never produce nuts so these trees what you're seeing here these holes of course are trees that have been cut off because they are not resistant to the blight but here again the root caller is sending up um regrowth regeneration and so what i'll probably do is trim this down to one and let it come back up just for aesthetics but these trees wouldn't be considered in our genetic program right now the reason i don't destroy them is that you never know we may have missed something and so you never want to destroy it's why we keep our f1 nursery still around even though we're not using them anymore you never know when genetically you might have to step back and i guess having grown up on a farm you always heard about corn however once in a while they had to step back the plant breeders had to step back and get some ancient gene from corn to fight a disease or an insect that had appeared in modern times so again this might be something that these trees might have a gene that we need in the future and so we preserve them see this is chinese here you can see the difference in the leaf here see there's no hooks and the serration is not as strong and the shape of the leaf is also different but it's got a that it normally would have a high glossy shine on it these do interbreed with the americans oh yes and that and we do have hybrids here and that so you will get intermediates the idea originally was to breed an american chestnut that was 98 american and 2 percent chinese with the chinese resistant genes and we're still doing that but breeding a pure american chestnut using our native resistance i think has is now become our priority this is sort of the backup plan although this was origin the original purpose was to develop as 98 pure american and using the chinese resistance but that was prior to us discovering that our native trees offered their own resistance it was just too dilute for mother nature without help to improve upon so for those that are looking for american chestnut that is a typical american chestnut leaf and like its name implies denata refers to the fact that the chestnut has a hook so what you want to look for is at the end here is that hook on the serration so that hook is what you look for the other thing to distinguish chinese from american american has sort of a matte forest green and chinese will have a high glossy dark green and that's when one way and of course the uh horse chestnut which is not related to the american chestnut at all has a pole mate lathe so it's got like your five fingers on your hand the leaflets are spread out and it's toxic so don't eat it so ron um i see there's these these are the seed pods on the ground yep those are burrs and in them were would be the chestnut fruit yep and i understand that um back in pioneer days the chestnut was so abundant that people would collect wagon loads of these to eat oh yes there's lots of stories of the early chestnut was a big economic driver the chestnuts were sold at the local market um guy i know in the west end of the county he tells the story that he collected chestnut off his dad's farm before the blight went through and sold them at the london market and that paid for his degree at the university of western ontario wow and also whatever was left over they would let their hogs run through at the end of the season and of course your hogs that were fed on chestnut picked up a distinct taste and the chicago market at one point would give a 50 cent per pound premium for hogs that were raised on chestnut because the ham had a very distinct taste and of course chestnuts ground into flour which is gluten-free and so chestnuts were a big big economy or part of the economy the other important factor was chestnut wood in 50 years you can grow a tree large enough to be logged and lumbered and chestnut was the ikea wood it was used in everything from cradle to grave and that's the name it was given your cradle would be made of chestnut so would your coffin it was used in all sorts of construction of houses and barns because it was very rot resistant actually better than cedar and very long lasting on farms it was used for split rail fences for fence posts telegraph telephone and even hydro poles were at one point using american chestnut and of course railroad ties for train tracks didn't require any creosote so the timber is very important so part of our program is not only to bring back the economy of the chestnuts themselves but bring back the economy of the timber itself a local guide they're trying to preserve a historic church in the west end of the county here and he was telling me how the interior of the church is all made of chestnut and cute including the pews so it draws an interest there in trying to preserve that do we know how many chestnuts are in the wild now in ontario um the latest figure we have is about 2384 i believe is the number that the research has told us now okay we still are finding chestnuts that are not recorded um but you got to realize that prior to the chestnut blade coming into southern ontario there was between 1.5 and 2 million trees in southern ontario and one out of every four hardwoods in southern ontario in the carolinian zone was an american chestnut well and that that's part of the ecological collapse there's at least 250 or more species that were dependent on the chestnut um for not only shelter and home roosting but also for the food crop chestnut is the only nut tree that produces a crop every year hickories oak walnuts have odd years where they don't produce in some cases it'll be two or three years between so wildlife could depend on the chestnut so with the demise of the chestnut so demise a number of populations of wildlife including black bear deer wild turkey and of course it's historical link to the passenger pigeon but there was other relationships songbirds relied on it for nesting and therefore uh when the songbird population fell so did things like the goshawk was taught its decline is tied to the american chestnut so it's a very important tree ecologically as well and that's part of our role is to try to restore the ecological economic and also the cultural role that it once played in uh north america here well ron thanks for having us out today it's been really educational and interesting well it's my pleasure and if anyone wants to know anything more about the canadian chestnut council our website is canadian chestnut council all one word dot ca that's great thank you thank you for coming out

Channel: Ontario Woodlot Association

Views: 5,246

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Id: 1NOCLNLma64

Length: 36min 37sec (2197 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022