American Chestnut Article

Whoops! I meant to post this some months ago. This is my Garden Geek article on American chestnut trees which appeared in the December edition of the Franklin Country Gazette.

The American Chestnut

At Idylbrook Field in Medway, an unmarked path leads through a meadow of wildflowers into rows of cultivated trees. A layman could easily overlook the site as a run-of-the-mill orchard if not for the sign explaining that these are Castanea dentata - American Chestnut.

If the words “American chestnut” don’t give you goose bumps, let me tell you why it should. Schoolchildren revere pandas and elephants and tigers, and most Americans have a soft spot in their heart for our bald national bird. The American Chestnut has similarly been pushed to the brink of extinction.

Castanea dentata is arguably more important a species than any of the charismatic fauna that top the food chain. A scant hundred years without American chestnuts has caused us to forget that East-coast forests used to be chestnut forests. These were New England’s sequoia. American chestnuts could average five feet in diameter and a hundred feet in height, but historic photos demonstrate that they grew much larger than that. On that sign in Idylbrook, a black-and-white photo shows three lumberjacks seated inside of the gash they have made in one tree - a trunk which is easily fifteen feet in diameter.

The chestnut was immensely valued for its wood. The trees grew fast and straight, producing hard wood that was so highly resistant to rot that there are still original chestnut barns standing. In Appalachia, they were known as “cradle-to-grave” trees, because the wood was used for everything, from fences to buildings, to cradles and coffins.

Unlike oak, which only produce a reliable crop of acorns every two to four years, American chestnuts produced copious yearly quantities of nuts. Not only were these a staple in the diet of Native Americans, but bear, elk, deer, turkey, doves, squirrels, blue jays, mice, and passenger pigeons were just some of the native animals that depended on the American chestnut to get through the winter. And Castanea dentata was a food source to hundreds of species of insects, which in turn were food for birds.

It was a fungus, accidentally introduced with an Asian chestnut, that killed the American chestnut. In 1904 the epidemic was first spotted at the Bronx zoo. This blight would kill a tree by forming cankers on the trunk that blocked the flow of water between roots and leaves. The fungus spread from tree to tree at a rate of fifty miles a year. The lumber industry reacted with a panicked spasm of logging that likely contributed to the loss of the few trees which would have survived the epidemic.

Within forty years, up to four billion American chestnuts were dead. Both North America’s ecosystem and the logging industry were irrevocably altered. The one paltry good came out of the tragedy was the passing of the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912, which has slowed, but not stopped other plant pathogens from wrecking havoc on other vital American plants.

There are now so few Castanea dentata remaining, numbering in the hundreds, and they are so widely dispersed, that without human intervention they would surely be the last generation of American chestnut trees. But enter the American Chestnut Foundation. This organization has been working for decades to raise awareness, identify and protect surviving chestnut trees, and most importantly, breed a hybrid American chestnut that retains just enough Chinese ancestry to be resistant to the blight.

To this end, TACF has hand-pollinated many of the remaining trees, carefully tending the resulting generations in test plots up and down the East Coast. This brings us back to Idylbrook. Here, six hundred chestnut trees stand in the sun, looking innocently healthy and inconspicuous, as if they were just another common tree.

The eldest of Idylbrook’s chestnuts have matured, and have begun producing nuts. In an act that seems cruel at a glance, this year these trees were deliberately exposed to the blight. At some point in the future, the three or four of the healthiest trees out of a hundred will be chosen as breeding stock for the next generation. The rest will be removed from the gene-pool with a chainsaw.

Someday American chestnut will again be a major part of both the logging industry and the ecology, thanks to the long-term efforts of TACF. This tree is a vital part of America’s landscape, and at Idylbrook, history is in the making. I urge you to go for a visit before the next round of culling takes place, and then get involved. Become a member, donate, or volunteer: volunteers will be needed when the trees are cut down, and are needed on a continual basis for weeding, watering, and other maintenance work. More information can be found at acf.org, and at masschestnut.org, which is the local chapter of TACF.

Woot, published again!

My Garden Geek article on American chestnut trees is in this week's edition of the Franklin Country Gazette. I didn't mean to go so long between articles, but this one had me intimidated, because I needed to contact actual people for my research. So, I procrastinated.

I'll post the article here in a week or so. In the mean time, here is a historic photo of some astoundingly large chestnut trees. There is some information on the origins of this photo in the TACF's most recent publication, but I left the magazine sitting on my desk at work, dang it, so I can't tell you much about it. But yes, that is a man standing there in the crotch of the trees for scale reference.

American Chestnut at Franklin Matters

I put up a post on American chestnut trees for Franklin Matters.

I've been getting in touch with TACF members to learn more about the Idylbrook breeding site. The biggest surprise? Most of the trees are going to be cut down next year. But this is a good thing! The trees have started to reach maturity. They have been exposed to the blight, and by next year, the breeders will be able to tell which ones are worth breeding. The rest are to be eliminated from the gene pool.

Even though it is an entirely logical step, the thought of these beautiful, healthy-looking American chestnuts being deliberately killed makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

They will be needing volunteers at some point, but nothing has been scheduled yet.

Ground Cherry at Franklin Matters

This week's Native Plant post is up at Franklin Matters. This week: Ground cherries! I need to rummage around the weeds by the shed and see if mine are ripe now.

Busy weekend!

That's not really me watering the grass, in the above photo; it's me, watering my son. It was a hot day and he really wanted to be wet. The end result was a two-year-old, soaked to the skin, beaming as he hauled the spewing hose around "watering" for Mommy.

Anyway, that was one of the photos I used for this week's native plant post at Franklin Matters.

Today we visited, for the first time, Old Sturbridge Village to check out agricultural practices from 200 years ago. I am so exhausted from the outing (and from an unusually hectic week at work) that I can't properly hop up and down while bubbling about what a truly awesome place that is. It's like a renaissance fair, but with dignity. We'll post pictures soon.

In other news, I'm officially a member of the American Chestnut Foundation now, and I'm so geeked out about the tree that I scrutinized the buildings at Old Sturbridge, because, surely, some of them must be made with chestnut wood.

Guest Rant at Garden Rant!

My guest rant is up over at Garden Rant today! I hope this brings some positive attention to the plight of Don and Benia, whose suburban ecosystem garden was mowed down by their town.

Don’t Take Wetlands for Granted

That's Gabe's foot on my article in the Franklin Country Gazette.


Don’t Take Wetlands for Granted


This summer, as we drove by a vast and scenic labyrinth of grasses and gleaming water, I remembered something my grandfather once said to me: “those do nothing but breed mosquitoes. They should all be filled in.” He was talking about the costal marshes of Galveston, Texas.

On this recent trip to Galveston, my family watched from the beach as something orange and formless drifted down the coast. Thankfully it wasn’t oil from BP’s spill - it was just seaweed, filled with tiny shrimp for the shore birds to feast on. But our trip was colored by the possibility that this might be the last time that we see the area alive with birds and crabs and native plants.

In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina we as a country are growing more aware that coastal wetlands offer a layer of hurricane protection to low-lying coastal cities. This is of particular importance to the city of Galveston, which was the victim of the nation’s worst natural disaster when, in 1900, a hurricane killed thousands. Exposed as it is, the Galveston area needs all the protection it can get, and BP’s oil spill is making it clear that its protective wetlands, too, are vulnerable.

Here in Massachusetts, our wetlands are similar buffers against natural disaster. When too much rain fell in too short a time this March, pavement and compacted lawns prevented the water from soaking naturally into the earth. Overloaded storm drains couldn’t contain the water, and small backyard streams burst their banks, filling roads and basements, because the water had nowhere else to go.

My own house stands mere feet above wetland, so I assumed that we would soon be underwater, too. But to my relief, the water level of the wetland varied only slightly. That wetland is the fringe of the Charles River watershed, which is, in essence, a very broad and slow-moving stream. The water entering the wetland seeps lazily from one vernal pool to the next as it trickles down the slope of the land, into the Charles, and down into the ground itself, to recharge the water-table below.

This area is so broad and sponge-like that it was able to absorb the torrent of water. It also slowed the water: it took a full twenty-four hours after the rain stopped for the flood to arrive ten miles downstream in Medfield, where it finally forced a closure of route 109. At that location, the road crosses a swath of Charles River wetlands three-quarters of a mile wide. Usually, that region looks like a field full of shrubs, but for that wet week, it looked like a lake. Had those wetlands been filled in because they did nothing but “breed mosquitoes”, there would have been catastrophic flood damage. Instead, there was just the one leisurely road closure.

Being at the head of the Charles river, Franklin, Bellingham, and Milford business are being targeted by the Environmental Protection Agency for new regulations surrounding the runoff from parking lots and roofs. The owners of large areas of impermeable surfaces may soon be required to route their storm water through engineered wetland. This is because wetland acts as a filter, removing phosphorous and other water pollutants before they contaminate the river. Should they pass, these regulations may be onerous for the business owners, but the environmental impact is potentially huge.

To this day pop culture perpetuates the myth of wetlands as being scary, dark, rotting and stinking homes of monsters, but in reality wetlands brim with flowering plants, stately trees, handsome autumn foliage, fascinating wildlife, and scenic views. Wetlands suffer from such bad reputation that in order to be accepted by the gardening public, they have had to be rebranded “water gardens”.

There are different types of wetlands to be seen at parks throughout Massachusetts. Salt marshes, for example, are visible from the Shining Sea Bikeway at Woods Hole. This is a good location for watching ospreys and red-winged blackbirds.

For the adventurous, a half-log trail snakes out into a white cedar bog at Ponkapoag Trail at the Blue Hills Reservation, just south of Boston. White cedar bogs are quite rare in Massachusetts. Three kinds of carnivorous plants live among the bog’s prehistoric-looking mosses. Be sure to bring shoes that can get wet.

Closer to home you can visit an example of our more common swamps and ponds at the Massachusetts Audubon’s Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Norfolk. There, a solid deck walkway - safe enough for strollers - leads through wetland and across a pond. Massive highbrush blueberry and swamp azalea bushes make a tunnel around the walkway, and armies of turtles laze among water lilies and exotic-looking pickerel weed.

There may be a few mosquitoes at these landscapes, but for such beautiful scenery, they are worth it.

Natives at Franklin Matters

This week's post at Franklin Matters is on goldenrod.

Why grow a lawn?

This is the second article of mine that was published in the local paper, the Franklin Country Gazette. My third article may be out in this week's paper, but I don't yet have a copy.


Why Grow a Lawn?

In my childhood, I lay on the grass of my Virginia lawn, picking dandelions, four-leaf clovers, and bluets. Now it is common to see signs warning that the grass is unsafe even to walk on, placed sidewalks by companies who want to convince us that a poisonous and homogonously flower-free lawn is somehow good for our children.

Prior to the twentieth century, the typical American yard was a mix of gardens and packed dirt. The clipped lawn originated in England, where it was a status symbol displayed by those who could afford to not to devote all of their land to livestock or farming. Those green power statements were watered with England’s soggy weather, mowed with scythes, and weeded by hand.

Wealthy Americans sought to emulate the practice, but gardeners are expensive, and neither the dry North American climate nor the native grasses were suitable for lawns. It took the introduction of mass-produced human-pushed reel lawnmowers, subsidized water, and garden hoses to make lawns a possibility for the middle class. And, oddly, the USDA had a hand in solving the grass “problem”: in 1915 they teamed up with the US Golf Association (golf itself originating in Scotland, a land of open grasslands) to find grasses that could withstand the North American climate. The final nail in the lawn-conformity coffin was a pamphlet circulated by the American Garden Club which stated that lawn was to be "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged."

It takes a barrage of chemicals to emulate English landscape, and these chemicals are dangerous to us and to our environment. Canada has banned all weed-and-feed lawn products. Here in Franklin it is illegal to spread pesticide, herbicide, or lawn fertilizer closer than 50 feet to a wetland. (And yet even though so many of us live adjacent to wetland, we are still solicited by lawn-chemical companies.)

For those who simply cannot do without lawn, there are organic methods of lawn-care, such as using old-fashioned push mowers. Corn gluten can be used as a pre-emergent herbicide. Lawn that is mowed higher is more healthy, and therefore more able to out-compete weeds. Clover can be added to contribute nitrogen to the soil, and newer varieties of grass require less water or no mowing at all.

For those who don’t care to obsess over having their lawn be an unblemished shade of green, however, there is an easier option. In a recent New York Times article, author Robert Wright suggests that we continue to grow and mow our existing lawns, but leave the chemicals out, and let the weeds back in. “Next time you see a yard full of sprouting dandelions,” he writes, “note that they look remarkably like things we call ‘flowers’.” Activities that require lawn can just as easily be played in the presence of weeds.

What else can we do? To the aesthetically-minded, a yard is a canvass to be painted with flowers and foliage. To environmentalists, a yard is a place to recreate habitat. To those who like a good meal, a yard is the place to grow vegetables. Alone or in concert, all of these approaches can bring our yards back to our not-so-distant American roots and away from the idealized indusrial lawn.

For those trying to recreate habitat, a good option can be to grow a backyard meadow. Meadow needs to be mowed only once a year, needs no water, no herbicides, no pesticides, and no fertilizer. There are many flowering plants that inhabit meadows, and the local wildlife will thank you for the food and shelter that your meadow provides.

The best way to grow a meadow, from a habitat perspective, is to kill the existing grass and replace it with North American native plants. An example of such a meadow can be seen at Garden in the Woods, in North Framingham, and during the growing season, its flowers are a wonder to behold. But a lawn left to grow tall can still be an environmental improvement. At Idylbrook Field, in Medway, mowed paths meander through a heady mix of native and non-native plants.

I am experimenting with such a meadow in my own yard. In theory, it will be kept tidy by maintaining a mowed strip around the edge. Last Autumn I sprinkled the area with the seeds of native meadow flowers and grasses. Already I can see milkweed growing. And I have an emergency backup: if the meadow doesn’t turn out to my satisfaction, I can mow it down and call it a weedy lawn once again.

Published!

This article was originally published in my local paper, the Franklin Country Gazette. That's me there, the "Garden Geek".


New England Gardens are Blooming


New England’s gardens are in bloom. Crocus and forsythia have led the way, followed by daffodils and tulips. Summer will bring lilacs, daylilies, and periwinkle. Because these are the flowers we see blooming across New England’s yards, it is easy to assume they are natives of New England. All of these plants, however, originate in Europe or Asia.

Some common garden flowers are natives of New England: rhododendron, phlox, and black-eyed Susan. Some species of azalea are native, as are some species of dogwood.

Commercial nurseries, and big box stores in particular, traditionally favor exotic plants over natives. This is a relic of decades past, when plants from abroad were a status symbol for the wealthy. The history of the tulip, for example, is particularly interesting. In 1637 the Dutch government had to crack down on a speculative tulip trade so rampant that a single tulip could sell for as much as a house.

Nurseries, for sound business reasons, like to sell plants that are easy to propagate and “pest resistant”. Landscaping companies use these cheap, tough McPlants as a green band-aid in the empty spaces around new buildings. This is why every parking lot in New England is surrounded by burning bush, forsythia, and daylilies.

Because nurseries have focused so heavily on exotics and on a few particularly showy natives, a wide selection of native flowers have gone unrecognized for their garden potential. If you saw it, would you recognize serviceberry, virgin’s bower, trillium, steeplebush, summersweet, or wild senna? Did you know that there are native orchids, called lady’s slipper? Have you ever seen the state flower of Massachusetts, the Mayflower?

If you have seen Mayflower or lady’s slipper, consider yourself lucky. Mayflower has been on the endangered species list since 1925. Lady’s slippers are quite rare, too, because people dig them up from the woods to take home, which usually kills them.

So much of New England has been converted to suburban lots, and so little remains undeveloped, that those plants not used in the garden trade are in rapid decline. And with them, also in decline, are the insect species that require those plants as food and habitat. Most bird species need insects to feed to their young, but the gardens of our yards and strip-malls are chock full of insect-resistant plants sprouting from insecticide-sprayed lawns and cedar-bark mulch hell strips. Forsythia and burning bush and daylilies may be lovely, but to our bird populations, they are deserts of starvation.

Author and entomologist Douglas Tallamy makes exactly this point in his book “Bringing Nature Home”. “We humans have disrupted natural habitats in so many ways and so many places,” he writes, “that the future of our nation’s biodiversity is dim unless we start to share the places in which we live. . . with the plants and animals that evolved there.” He posits that our suburban lots have the potential to be both glorious flower displays and havens for wildlife, if we just go a little out of our way to locate and garden with native plants. His book includes detailed information on native trees, as well as native flowers and grasses, and native butterflies and the plants that host them.

Thankfully, local nurseries are responding to a budding interest in natives among gardeners and landscape professionals. Be sure to let the nursery staff know that you are looking for native plants. Don’t be fooled by packets of “wildflower” seed, because “wild” does not necessarily mean “native”. Read the labels on what you buy, and if in doubt, consult the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service Plants Database at plants.usda.gov , where you can view the native status and range of almost any plant growing in the US.

Even if they have caught the enthusiasm for native plants, local nurseries are still likely to be limited to the most popular picks. But this is where the internet comes to the rescue, with online native plant sources such as Prairie Moon Nursery and Easy Wild Flowers.

Here in Massachusetts we also happen to be near the New England Mecca for native plant lovers: the Garden in the Woods, in North Framingham. Garden in the Woods, part of the New England Wild Flower Society, is a wooded parkland that has been heavily and exclusively gardened with native plants. The scenic trails meander through every possible New England garden setting, from deep shade to desert to meadow to wetland. Garden in the Woods offers classes, consulting services, and extensive information at newfs.org. And, of course, Garden in the Woods has a nursery where many varieties of hard-to-find native plants can be purchased.

This spring, make yours a truly New England garden by planting Massachusetts’s state flower.

Some Good, Some Bad

Well, I got to write a guest post over at Garden Rant, which was pretty cool. And then as a thank-you I was banned from Wildlife Gardeners. Because, it seems, they think I'm being paid by Garden Rant to be subversive. Or something.

Their motives over at WG are actually quite good, so be nice to them if you visit. My handle used to be Stoloniferous. Maybe someone more level-headed can tell me if I was being an ass-hat, as I am rather upset and incapable of making such a judgement right now.

As my husband says, since I have had an article published at Wildlife Gardeners as well, that Garden Rant should ban me, too.

The American Chestnut

“By 1950, the keystone species of more than 30 million acres of eastern forests (roughly the size of New York) had been essentially eliminated. Millions of acres of dead, but still standing trees, were all that remained.”

So reads a sign in a small park called Idylbrook Field in the town of Medway, near my home here in Massachusetts. On the sign are photos of black-and-white moonscapes populated with the looming carcasses of trees killed by an Asian fungus that was accidentally introduced to the continental U.S. in 1904. Behind the sign are rows of young trees - green, and for the moment, healthy. Here, the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) (www.afc.org) is working to bring the American chestnut, Castanea dentata, back from the brink of extinction.




There are barns and split-rail fences made out of chestnut wood that still stand. Chestnut is, or I should say was, an exceptionally good tree for timber. The trees were fast-growing , tall, hard-wooded, and as resistant to rot as redwood. In old-growth areas, trees could average a hundred feet tall and five feet in diameter. To give you some comparison, look at a towering oak tree. A hundred years ago, that oak would have been an understory tree in a chestnut grove.

When the chestnut fell, it wasn’t the soundless tree falling in the forest: it was a great blow to the timber industry, and its fall led to the nation’s first plant quarantine laws. But what unnerves me is that most Americans no longer know about this profound and recent change in America’s forests. Ask a typical person where a five-foot diameter tree should be growing, and they’ll tell you to look in the Sequoia National Forest; yet on the TACF sign is a photo of loggers posing in front of a chestnut trunk ten feet wide.

If a plant of such physical and economic girth can be forgotten in a matter of decades, what of the other native plants of less importance to us that have quietly dwindled, unnoticed, right beneath our feet? We may stop to wonder where the butterfly has gone that we saw during our childhood; it turns out that the butterfly required a particular humble plant to reproduce, and that plant has been forced into ever-decreasing margins by parking lots, lawns, and the blooming deserts maintained by well-meaning gardeners.

This is why most of my own gardening efforts go to raising native plants. I strive to make an Eden of my suburban lot while simultaneously providing a refuge for flora and fauna otherwise forced to survive off of the litter-strewn space behind the pizza shop down the street. As of now I am eyeing my yard for potential locations to plant some of the American Chestnut Foundation’s seedlings, which are available online. For two and a half decades, the forward-thinking folk at TAFC have been working on a cross between American chestnut and Chinese, which is blight-resistant. Please consider planting one of TACF’s seedlings in your own yard to assist the breeding program.