American Chestnut - A Moving Filbert Vision
John H. Gordon Jr.
www.geocities.com/nuttreegordon/ChsFilWh.htm
American chestnut trees are impressive from when we first met. The most comparable tree is the red oak, followed by the saw tooth oak. However, the Chestnut Bark Blight (CB) kept this a “moving” vision until no more native chestnut could be found in Amherst in the late 1970s. Now that The NY Chapter of ACF has plantings of NY mother tree lines out and about, we are seeing visions, and moving visions.
So far we are lucky. The Zoar Planting has blight, but also a white bark organism (like tiny curds of cottage cheese) that coat chestnut blight, blight pustules, and lenticels. This limits the blight in a chestnut that grows callus against the blight.. I take it that this white organism evolved by invading the large bark pores, lenticels, and was fed chestnut fluids as a fee to bounce invading flora and fauna. Pimply teenagers should have such a fix. This organism usually grows in humid areas around Sodus Bay to a visible size, the tiny cheese curd size. Several large trees show this. Under the right conditions this organism seems to swell all over, and even inside chestnut bark where blight, living bark, and white organism live in proximity like in the Wilson Road tree, Zoar. Then conditions dry, and it disappears, almost. Speculation is that our chestnuts with enough resistance to begin callusing against a canker (chestnut’s natural defense), and an assist from bouncer organisms that eject the blight (eat it), may survive quite a bit of injury until conditions arrive unfavorable to chestnut.
We have to find a way of inoculating our chestnut groves with organisms which kill off chestnut blight the same way mushroom spawn is killed by an invading infection. One of these organisms is a white organism (this time a white fluff, but likely the same organism above.) that attacks the fruiting bodies of Eastern Filbert Blight (EFB). It makes sense that a fungus, whether fairy rings of mushrooms, or canker pustules on trees, only live so long until they are attacked by other invaders. The reason I feel the EFB white organism is the same CB white organism is that it surfaced on EFB infected seedlings soon (noticed in two years) after I brought in bark chips with CB white organism, and dug the chips into the margins of the CB cankers. The black EFB pustules were covered with fuzzy white stuff much more quickly than CB cankers were likewise invaded. However, the natural spread of EFB white organism to chestnut has kept CB to low incidence (few red pustules). This natural spread is far easier than me moving bark chips. The CB white organism comes and goes with wet or dry seasons, but as long as I am growing filbert to find EFB immunity, the EFB white organism will be spreading far and wide, moving into CB cankers, and probably hiding unobserved in most every lenticel. This may be how in nursery stock it moved to the Zoar Planting. Soon the humid conditions in the deep tree shelters caused the white organism move up, and cover lenticels and bark.
Chestnut blight is usually, but not always, a surface condition. It is easy for us to spot CB. EFB white organisms easily find, invade, and kill CB unless CB moves too deep too fast. EFB white organism finds, invades, but does not kill off all EFB cankers because EFB runs deep into the filbert wood often outpacing the white organism. Rutgers is testing EFB and filbert resistance. When Rutgers asked for my samples they asked for black pustules, uncontaminated with the white organism. After looking high and low for black pustules free of white organism I decided this was near impossible in February-March. What I sent was cankers with little or no white, and few black, pustules. My advice is to start the EFB from the infection deep in the wood.
I moved six 3 ft. filbert bushes with a few signs of white pustules to the south side of the Zoar planting during our planting day in April 2000. By planting day 2001 only one bush was alive; not the success I expected. To do it again I would put out a hedge of EFB free bushes. The notion persists that the white organism should be CB white organism, and be tested by being spread to filbert from chestnut. The filbert will be inoculated with EFB, the CB white organism will travel to the filbert to be made the permanent viable source of CB white organism. (We should watch for it on native chestnut trees, and repeatedly establish it on the margins of chestnut blight cankers, so that it spreads in the groves, and then to filbert.) Repetition proves this experiment, and should improve the CB white organism. The filbert will spread it far and wide which is their “bouncer” fee in a chestnut grove. The filbert should probably be rotated out and in the chestnut groves to be sure the CB white organism is not being degraded.