2024
American Chestnut
Symposium

The American chestnut and its allies in space and time

The American chestnut is part of a major lineage of trees that has an evolutionary history extending back at least 80 million years. Many of these trees, for example oak, beech, hickory, and walnut, as well as alder, birch, hazel and hornbeam, are significant components in the temperate forests of eastern North America and eastern Asia. All these lineages have a deep and complicated history, characterized by both extinction and diversification. But their more recent history in response to changing climates, and their cultural history through their associations with people, is equally complex. Understanding the evolutionary and cultural history of these trees is important as we seek to manage their future and the future of the plant communities of which they are part.

Biography

Peter Crane is President of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia (osgf.org), an estate of Rachel Lambert Mellon that includes an exquisite garden as well as an exceptional library focused on the history of plant science, plant exploration, and the development of gardens and landscape design. He is known internationally for his work on the diversity of plant life – its origin, fossil history, current status, conservation and use. Peter Crane was elected to the Royal Society – the UK academy of sciences in 1998 and was knighted in the UK for services to horticulture and conservation in 2004.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the German Academy Leopoldina.  He is the recipient of several honorary degrees from universities in the UK and US, including honorary doctorates of science from the University of Connecticut and Sewanee: The University of the South, in the US, and Cambridge University in the UK. He received the International Prize for Biology in December 2014 and the Garden Club of America Medal of Honor in 2024.

Chestnut research and restoration in Connecticut

Since the early 1900s, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station has conducted work on chestnut blight. Through the efforts of scientists, students, landowners, land managers, and the active membership of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, the work to restore the American chestnut has continued in Connecticut. The talk highlights the past and ongoing efforts in chestnut research and restoration in Connecticut, showcases some unique chestnut plantings and chestnut trees, and presents the people doing the work in Connecticut. The talk also overviews recent regional and national efforts and breakthroughs, and how restoration of the American chestnut can improve forest resilience in the eastern United States.

Biography

Dr. Susanna Keriö is an Assistant Scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES). Susanna has her background in forest pathology and forest ecology, with expertise in tree stress responses and tree resistance to fungal pathogens. Dr. Keriö earner her doctoral degree in forest ecology and pathology at the University of Helsinki, and conducted postdoctoral research at Oregon State University. Current research in the Keriö lab at CAES includes quantifying the impact of site factors on urban tree health, impacts of mycorrhizal inoculation on tree health, tissue culture of chestnuts, and how chestnuts respond to chestnut blight infection. Susanna is a board member on the Connecticut Urban Forest Council and on the Connecticut Tree Protection Examining Board. Susanna’s goal is to leverage her research for applications in tree health management to grow healthier trees and forests.

The story of the lost chestnut bee, Andrena rehni, in Connecticut

When the American Chestnut vanished from the landscape, many insects that depended upon that tree species for survival also vanished. We may never know how many insect species went extinct from the loss of this keystone species in the environment, however we do know that some insect species managed to dodge the bullet, including a very tiny mining bee called Andrena rehni. The chestnut bee, Andrena rehni, is a pollen specialist of Castanea, meaning it only uses the pollen from chestnut or chinquapin to feed its young. A thriving population of this bee species was recently discovered in New England in the chestnut orchards at Lockwood Farm in Hamden, Connecticut in 2019, with subsequent detections in Massachusetts. There also appears to be remnant populations of Andrena rehni in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The mystery of how this bee species survived and where its strongholds currently are is being investigated.

Biography

Ms. Tracy Zarrillo is a melittologist who began her career at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) in 1992. She was initially hired as an Agricultural Research Assistant II and over the course of her early career she worked on a variety of research topics such as organic agricultural pest management practices, IPM, exotic pests, and forest insects. Since 2010, her work has primarily focused on pollinator diversity, pollinator health, and pollinator conservation. She is recognized as a regional wild bee expert by leading bee researchers across North America and is an active member of several national and international organizations that are working to assess the status of wild bee species across the globe. Ms. Zarrillo was promoted to Assistant Agricultural Scientist 1 in 2022 for her initiative and tangible accomplishments in pollinator research. She developed and managed a wild bee monitoring program for Connecticut which ran from 2010-2021 and is currently writing a checklist of confirmed bee species for Connecticut, highlighting rare and regionally declining species, species of historical significance for fruit pollination, and vulnerable species that have specific habitat and/or host requirements. She is also collaborating with the Connecticut Department of Energy and the Environment, the University of Rhode Island, and the National Resources Conservation Service on meadow restoration projects in Connecticut and is monitoring the response of wild bees to the improved habitat over time.

A Kingdom of Green: Teaching the Poetry of Trees

In this time of great anxiety and unrest, fostering a deep literacy of the forest is perhaps more essential than ever, but it can be challenging. Students are often besieged with grief. Some are distracted, others are apathetic, and worse, some are resistant to learning, especially about trees. How then to break through? How to share not just the facts but cultivate a lasting experience that might bring learners close to trees, bridging the divide between our kingdom and theirs? Drawing from over twenty years of teaching creative writing workshops, poet Nickole Brown will share her successes (and failures) to give you some approaches to leading a class about (and for) trees. She’ll share teaching philosophies that have guided her as well as step-by-step assignments you can use with learners at any age or level of expertise. This session will give you tips for how to utilize a careful mix of research, observation techniques, and embodiment exercises to help others (and perhaps even your own self) story the facts and move forward with an awareness that doesn’t turn away, despite the news.

Biography

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Nickole was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but the majority of her teaching experience has been on the road. She’s taught at conferences from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Homer, Alaska, and she’s led workshops at Poets House, Hugo House, the Hindman Settlement School, 24 Pearl Street at The Fine Arts Works Center at Provincetown, and many other places. Currently, she’s on faculty at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She’s President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October 2025.

Where was it, and why was it there? A geographer’s approach to mapping and modeling the historical distribution of the American chestnut

Essential to the successful restoration of the American chestnut is knowing the optimal environmental conditions for the tree species, as well as knowing its past geographic distribution. But how do researchers know where chestnut trees grew in the past – a species which went functionally extinct more than a century ago? This talk covers the methods of mapping and modeling the historical distribution of the American chestnut. It presents an overview of conventional and unconventional data sources for range reconstruction such as fossil pollen, land survey records, legacy vegetation studies, other historical documents, and even toponyms (place names). It explains how researchers have used historical observations of chestnut to inform models of the past distribution of chestnut. It also shows how comparing historical observations with climate, soil, terrain, and land-use data can reveal the environmental conditions under which the chestnut thrived.

Biography

Stephen J. Tulowiecki is an Associate Professor of Geography & Sustainability Studies at The State University of New York at Geneseo. He teaches courses in varied topics such as geographic information systems, statistics, environmental issues, and mountain geography. His research interests are in forest ecosystems of the eastern US, particularly Native American management of forested landscapes, and the geographic distribution of rare and interesting tree species such as the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) and pawpaw (Asimina triloba).

What replaced the American chestnut in New England? Future forests in a changing world

Everyday human perspectives of time and forest development are different from our scientific understanding of the actual growth and dynamics of forests. For millions of years, forests have co-evolved with their climates and with the disturbances that climates promote. Humans have made their livelihoods within forests for thousands of years. New England forests are no different. New England forests originated after the last glaciation and have been changing in their composition, structure, and dynamics ever since. But in the last three hundred years they have exponentially been impacted by both chronic and episodic anthropogenic disturbances that are ongoing and increasing. I will discuss the role that chestnuts played in the New England forest before its demise and how these forests responded in both structural and compositional change to chestnut’s absence in an unpredictable world of changing climate and exotic plants, pathogens and insects.

Biography

Dr. Mark Ashton is a Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, Director of Yale Forests, and Senior Associate Dean for The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment. His research focuses on the biological and physical processes governing the regeneration of natural forests and the mechanisms underlying the diversity of forest ecosystems and their adaptability to climate change. He conducts his long-term research in both temperate and tropical forests and has worked in forests from New England to Sri Lanka and from Canada to Brazil.