Charlottesville Words

American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan FreinkelRead more about this book…

As soon as you try to tell the story of a single organism, you run into trouble. No creature lives in isolation; all living beings exist inextricably in a network of relationships and dependencies. Meteorologists joke that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Nebraska can trigger a hurricane in Java. Take that same butterfly species out of its prairie ecosystem, and the devastation wrought on the plants it pollinates, the birds that feed on it, the parasites and predators that in turn depend on those plants and birds, is as severe as any hurricane.

Old-timers say that once upon a time a squirrel could have traveled from Maine to Georgia going from chestnut to chestnut without ever touching the ground. Now, because of a fungal blight accidentally imported from Asia, it is rare to see an American Chestnut. The disappearance of the chestnut has altered — in some ways, devastated — the Appalachian ecosystem and its economy. The story of the chestnut’s disappearance and the hope for its return is the subject of Susan Freinkel‘s American Chestnut.

American Chestnut has a strong Virginian thread running through it. Just a few examples:

• William Alphonso Murrill, a Virginia native, identified the fungus that causes chestnut blight.
• Flippo Gravatt, plant pathologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, became “one of the chief chroniclers of the tree’s slow, sad demise.”
• Plant geneticist Ralph Singleton, of the University of Virginia, promoted irradiation of chestnuts to accelerate their rate of mutation in hopes of generating a blight-resistant line.
• The Wagner Research Farm, in Meadowview, Va., is the headquarters of The American Chestnut Foundation‘s backcross breeding program. In backcross breeding, American and Chinese chestnuts are crossed. The fruits of that cross are then bred back to the American chestnut to eventually create a hybrid that is mostly genetically American, but with the Chinese resistance to blight.
• Gary Griffin at Virginia Tech continues his chestnut research into retirement.

Freinkel will be discussing American Chestnut at the Virginia Festival of the Book, on panels titled Science Writing: Life Cycles and Old Chestnuts: American Culture in Conflict. See you there!

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