Native Tree/Plant Plight

[Woolly Bugger]

How 2 botanists risked everything to raft the Grand Canyon in 1938
Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter were the first non-Indigenous women to run the Colorado River and survive

Melissa Sevigny never wanted to raft the Colorado River. Somewhere between "outdoorsy" and "adventurous," she wasn't enough of an adrenaline junkie to seek out days of isolation beneath the Grand Canyon's 4,000-foot cliffs, which preclude cell service, internet and quick emergency exits. But in 2021, for the sake of a book she was writing, Sevigny put fear aside and set out on the river.

"There's nothing else like it," Sevigny told SFGATE. "The psychology of it is so hard to explain — the rest of the world becomes very unreal. You're just living intensely in the present. We talk a lot about self-care and meditation up here, how to ground yourself in the present moment, but it just happens when you're down there."

Rafting the canyon was part of Sevigny's research for "Brave the Wild River," the first text to document the lives of trailblazing botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter. In 1938, Clover and Jotter conducted a harrowing 43-day trip down the Colorado River in an effort to map the Grand Canyon's flora. They succeeded, despite rampant sexism and numerous physical challenges. Today, their work offers botanists the only written record of the plants that existed in the canyon prior to the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, which transformed the landscape.

https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/2-botanists-risked-everything-raft-grand-canyon-20263880.php

[Woolly Bugger]

New challenge aims to bring 1,000 thriving chestnut trees to NYC
The goal is to help distribute American chestnut saplings and eventually grow the trees.

A new challenge toward residents aims to bring 1,000 thriving chestnut trees to New York City.
The goal is to help distribute American chestnut saplings and eventually grow the trees.
The American chestnut was once one of the most abundant trees in North America before a fungal disease began to kill off the population.



https://bronx.news12.com/new-challenge-aims-to-bring-1000-thriving-chestnut-trees-to-nyc

[Woolly Bugger]

[Woolly Bugger]

New effort aims to replant functionally extinct American Chestnut trees across New York City

There's a new effort to replant functionally extinct trees that once populated the New York City area by the billions.

Researchers are working to make the American Chestnut more resistant to the fungus that wiped them out.

American Chestnut trees nearly wiped out by fungus
A fragile sapling now taking root in Green-Wood Cemetery's Chestnut Path is part of an ambitious new effort to bring back a tree that once dominated northeastern forests.

The American Chestnut was once considered one of the largest and fastest-growing species in the region, but a deadly fungal disease nearly wiped it out. Now, a partnership between the New York Restoration Project and the American Chestnut Foundation is working to change that.

"Scientists estimate that we lost around 3 billion trees within a really short window of time," said Jason Smith of the New


York Restoration Project. "It was the first real disaster caused by an invasive disease in our forests after colonization."

>>>A small group of chestnuts is now growing at the cemetery, though several have already succumbed to the disease. Researchers are closely observing the survivors to better understand resistance patterns. The few trees that continue to thrive are being propagated for future planting across the five boroughs.

"Our chestnuts are really productive," said Sara Evans, Director of Living Collections and Curator at Green-Wood Cemetery. "They flower and produce a ton of nuts every single year."


https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/replanting-american-chestnut-trees-extinct-new-york-city/

[Woolly Bugger]

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[Woolly Bugger]

Rare American Chestnut trees in Freeport nominated as Illinois state champions


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"It looks like the Natural Land Institute's Legacy Tree Program has found yet another Illinois state champion tree: a rare American chestnut (Castanea dentata) in Freeport," said Alan Branhagen, executive director. "Actually, the exciting news is that there are two growing side by side! Because of the rarity of this species and its great conservation concern, we are featuring both of them as the July Trees of the Month. One is larger than the other and we will submit it to the Illinois Big Tree Register and expect it to become the new state champion."

Located in the front yard of a private residence, the bigger tree is about 73 feet tall, with an average crown spread of over 41 feet and a trunk circumference of 135 inches. Nominated by Sharon Welton, executive director, Stephenson County Historical Society Museum and Arboretum.


https://www.dailyherald.com/20250714/submitted-content/rare-american-chestnut-trees-in-freeport-nominated-as-illinois-state-champions/

[Woolly Bugger]

What can the emerald ash borer reveal about the long-ago loss of American chestnut?

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For more than 70 years, the American chestnut tree has, mostly, been absent from the landscape. But historical accounts of its grandeur and the tons of nutritious seeds it produced every fall have made it loom large in New England's forest memory.

Now, as another tree disappears — the ash — scientists working in the White Mountains of New Hampshire hope they can document its demise to gain a new, deeper understanding of how species losses ripple through ecosystems.

When most American chestnuts were killed by chestnut blight in the first half of the 20th century, the loss of the species was felt both culturally and ecologically. The trees were among the largest in the forest, reaching heights of more than 100 feet. Scientists know the species took with it an autumnal chestnut crop that was nutritious for people and wildlife alike. They also suspect that the die-off disrupted tree-specific communities of insects and soil microbes. But regarding what those communities looked like, and to what extent their loss rippled through the forest ecosystem, they can only make educated guesses.

"More or less, the species has been deleted from the landscape," said UNH professor Jeff Garnas, who studies forest ecosystems and health in the Northeast. "... That happened 100 years ago, and we really have very little ecological understanding of what the consequences of the loss of (American chestnut) are," he said.

Now, Garnas and the other researchers working on the Ash Protection Experiment at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, in the White Mountains, hope they will be able to shed light on the effects of tree loss events by studying another as it unfolds.


https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2025/10/13/what-can-the-emerald-ash-borer-reveal-about-the-long-ago-loss-of-american-chestnut/

[dublhaul]

My grandparents were born in the 1890s in western North Carolina, and spent most of their lives there.  Early on, they worked, and raised four daughters, in logging camps (they were cooks).  I heard many stories, and they had several photos of the loggers toppling trees (many of them chestnut) with their crosscut saws and double bit axes.  The stumps looked like they were redwoods in the NW (to me, as a kid). Their house, still standing and lived in by a cousin, was framed entirely in rough-cut chestnut.  There is nary a worm hole (all pre-blight) and nary a 2x4, but lots of 2x10s and 2x12s.  One of their stories was about turning the pigs loose to forage in the woods for chestnuts.  When I was a kid, there was a fairly large homesite of several acres across the street (still in the city limits, in sight of the county courthouse) that had standing, but long dead, chestnut trees on it.  A subsequent owner of the property logged those.  THey were wormy, but still solid, and I presume very valuable.

[Woolly Bugger]

America Lost Its One Perfect Tree
Lumber, shelter, delicious nuts—there was nothing the American chestnut couldn't provide.


Across the Northeast, forests are haunted by the ghosts of American giants. A little more than a century ago, these woods brimmed with American chestnuts—stately Goliaths that could grow as high as 130 feet tall and more than 10 feet wide. Nicknamed "the redwoods of the East," some 4 billion American chestnuts dotted the United States' eastern flank, stretching from the misty coasts of Maine down into the thick humidity of Appalachia.
The American chestnut was, as the writer Susan Freinkel noted in her 2009 book, "a perfect tree." Its wood housed birds and mammals; its leaves infused the soil with minerals; its flowers sated honeybees that would ferry pollen out to nearby trees. In the autumn, its branches would bend under the weight of nubby grape-size nuts. When they dropped to the forest floor, they'd nourish raccoons, bears, turkey, and deer. For generations, Indigenous people feasted on the nuts, split the wood for kindling, and laced the leaves into their medicine. Later on, European settlers, too, introduced the nuts into their recipes and orchards, and eventually learned to incorporate the trees' sturdy, rot-resistant wood into fence posts, telephone poles, and railroad ties. The chestnut became a tree that could shepherd people "from cradle to grave," Patrícia Fernandes, the assistant director of the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, told me. It made up the cribs that newborn babies were placed into; it shored up the coffins that bodies were laid to rest inside.
But in modern American life, chestnuts are almost entirely absent. In the first half of the 20th century, a fungal disease called blight, inadvertently imported from Asia on trade ships, wiped out nearly all of the trees. Chestnut wood disappeared from newly made furniture; people forgot the taste of the fruits, save those imported from abroad. Subsistence farmers lost their entire livelihoods. After reigning over forests for millennia, the species went functionally extinct—a loss that a biologist once declared "the greatest ecological disaster in North America since the Ice Age."


https://archive.ph/9i9ZR#selection-669.0-695.71

[Woolly Bugger]

Wander Through a Grove of Wild American Chestnuts
Decades of conservation work have brought the functionally extinct tree back to public lands

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Where: Virginia
When: year-round
If you like: the outdoors and sports, conservation

Why you should go: American chestnut trees dominated Eastern mountainscapes at the time of European colonization, standing one hundred feet tall and ten feet wide at maturity and covering an estimated 200 million acres from Mississippi to Maine. Carpenters prized their lumber. Gourmands regaled their nuts as the world's finest.

https://gardenandgun.com/articles/wander-through-a-grove-of-wild-american-chestnuts/