Tree Hugger
The blog is about to undergo one of those major overhauls that everyone else’s blog gets from time to time. I’ve decided I don’t like the width of the paragraph, because I can write forever and it seems like I’ve written nothing. My screen is a widescreen, and then I’ll see the same blog entry on someone else’s monitor and think I’ve written too much. I came across a recommendation of no more than two alphabets wide, anyway, and this way blows that. My feel of what I’m doing here is very different now than in April when I started on this thing, anyway. So the construction signs will be up and I’ll be fiddling around a lot in the next couple of weeks.
For now, though, there was a ray of sunshiny news from the Montgomery Advertiser last week, so I thought I’d share it with you. The largest tree in the state of Alabama is an American chestnut! It’s estimated to be 25-40 years old, and is producing nuts. The really neat bit is that this wasn’t a study tree, planted by conservationists. The only special protection it had was being part of the Talledega National Forest.
The American chestnut was nearly destroyed by an Asian chestnut blight, and researchers have been working my entire lifetime to restore it. They’re getting closer to restoring the once dominant tree back to its home here in the Eastern US. When I was a child, I’d go to the Arboretum at Auburn University and be all cooled out about the research they were doing to make the tree more resistant to fungus, including creating hybrids with Chinese chestnuts. I’ve always wondered what the Appalachians looked like when they were in their full glory. I’ve only really seen images like these. I hope I will get to see them in their full glory by the end of my lifetime!
Relatedly, here’s an article on 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the world. Enjoy!
I think that it would be awesome to have American chestnuts actually growing wild. That would be most impressive.