|
 A bit of tree-growing globalization has helped, officials said at a ceremony Thursday led by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, who called the chestnut "a tree so majestic that it is called the 'Redwood of the East.'"
Scientists are producing blight-resistant trees by crossing American and Chinese chestnuts. The Chinese variety can withstand the Asian fungus that first infected the nation's 4 billion American chestnuts around 1904 in New York City, and nearly wiped all of them out.
"After a period of up to 30 years, this leads to trees that are 100 percent blight resistant and 94 percent American," said Marshal Case, president of the American Chestnut Foundation in Bennington, Vt. "American chestnut likes the new advanced mine reforestation practices, and is proving it with remarkable growth."
Kempthorne and Case each hefted a shovelful of dirt to help plant a sprightly American-Chinese tree Thursday outside the Interior Department. The occasion was the 30th anniversary of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, through which the government has tried to turn former coal mining sites into grasslands and hardwood forests.
The American chestnut once flourished among 200 million acres of eastern woodlands
-- about the size of California and Maine combined. The woodlands stretched from Maine to Florida, and as far west as the Ohio Valley. Now, few tree-size chestnuts remain; the tallest, at 60 feet, is found in Kentucky, the foundation says.
[to top of second column]
 |
 Coal-mining industry employees, university researchers, schoolchildren and other volunteers led by Case's foundation have planted more than 3,000 chestnuts in seven Appalachian states, Kempthorne said. That's helping turn around the fate of the "spreading chestnut tree" in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1840 paean to the village blacksmith.
"The coal fields of Appalachia match up almost perfectly with what once was the natural range of the American chestnut," Kempthorne said. "We have discovered that chestnuts grow twice as fast on the loosely packed soils commonly found on reclamation sites. This bodes very well for what is about to occur."
___
On the Net:
American Chestnut Foundation: http://www.acf.org/
[Associated Press;
by John Heilprin]
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
 |
