By Ellery Woods Sinclair
Member of the Board of Directors
CT Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation
This past spring Christine Cadigan, the chapter's intern through a Duke University grant, and I scouted Salisbury's Mount Riga to find an accessible mother tree. I knew that Riga had an abundance of chestnut trees, especially root sprouts. Slowly driving up the mountain, we saw many small trees over-hanging and some back from the road under the forest canopy.
[click for larger photo]Up on the top, a fine, easily accessible chestnut beckoned to us with golden catkins. About thirty feet tall in full sunlight, our specimen provided a clipped branch tip for verification as American.
Before spring was over, our Bartlett Tree Expert backed in the cherry picker to prepare the tree for pollination. A few weeks later he returned (after careful hand pollination) re-bagged the tree as Christine and I watched in the pouring rain.
[click for larger photo]The nearly forty bagged branch ends — including four not-pollinated controls — waved in the breeze waiting (as pictured) until fall when the pollinated burs would be ready for harvest. In early October I met our Bartlett Tree Expert — Christine having returned to her studies. He clipped the bagged branch tips containing the burs, all required a few more days to ripen by hanging in my cool garage safe from rodents. In about two weeks those Riga mother-tree burs produced thirty-seven nuts, providing the foundation for a new line for our Connecticut orchards.
[click for larger photo]At the Great Mountain Forest orchard in late September I presented — as orchard manager for the CT Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation in association with the Berkshire Litchfield Environmental Council — a program for the Housatonic Heritage Walks. One of their many programs, the American Chestnuts Lost and Found presentation was well-attended (as pictured) by those interested in the history regarding the loss of this valuable hardwood and the rationale for and method of bringing the American chestnut back to forest our landscape again — until a century ago, a primary tree.
[click for larger photo]Houstatonic Heritage Walk Tour at Great Mountain Forest Orchard
Photo: Mary Lu Sinclair
The Great Mountain Forest orchard, maintained in partnership with the Housatonic Valley Regional High School Ag/Science Department students, contains about 300 saplings (15/16ths American & 1/16 Chinese from the back-cross generations) awaiting selection and the first inter-cross generation procedure in five to seven years.
The reward of this endeavor is it's being about the future, rooted in the past. In another half-century our great grandchildren will harvest the nuts and the timber, as did their forbearers a hundred and fifty years ago and before.
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