The Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Resources Division (WRD), Georgia Botanical Society, and the Georgia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation announce a recent discovery of a small stand of American Chestnut trees on F.D. Roosevelt (FDR) State Park in Harris County, Georgia.
This once mighty tree has been decimated throughout its range by the introduced chestnut blight, and only sprouts remain. In middle Georgia, this species was especially hard hit for reasons unknown, and until the discovery of the FDR trees, only one other tree was known from outside the Blue Ridge in Georgia. The FDR trees represent the southernmost known American chestnut trees in the United States, making conservation of their unique genetic characters especially important.
“It is a rare opportunity to see an entire stand, albeit a small one, of American chestnut trees, many of which are in the forest canopy,” said Nathan Klaus, WRD Sr. Wildlife Biologist and discoverer of the Harris County stand. “None of these trees show injury from blight.”
In spite of the unusual absence of blight on these trees, experts believe genetic resistance is highly unlikely. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is the dryness of the site, which may not give the blight a competitive advantage.
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“While standing amongst these impressive trees, you can almost imagine what the forest on Pine Mountain used to look like,” said Klaus.
Controlled pollination is planned for this spring using pollen provided by The American Chestnut Foundation. This pollen will be obtained from trees that the Foundation has produced from over 20 years of breeding American chestnuts with the Chinese chestnut. This cross-pollination effort hopes to eventually produce a tree that will be identical to American chestnut and also carry over the highly blight resistant characteristics of the Chinese chestnut.
“This is a terrific find,” said David Keehn, president of the Georgia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. “The large tree that we plan to pollinate at the FDR site is a beautiful and very rare specimen. We’re very excited about capturing the genes of this specimen and perhaps others around Pine Mountain. Hopefully a few years down the road we’ll have many progeny from this tree that we can reintroduce back into the forest.”