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!