Poetry and trees

When my mother was in school, she was required to memorize poems.  One of her favorites was "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  I can remember her quoting it: 

"Under a spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands..."  

As a child, I imagined my father as the smithy.  He was a farmer, not a blacksmith, and he didn't fit the description of the blacksmith in the poem, but that didn't matter to me (besides, our name was Smith!).  Dad loved trees, and occasionally he would talk nostalgically of the American Chestnut trees which used to grow on our farm.  They were long gone by the time I was a child, with only a few large, rotting, reddish stumps and logs left in the woods as reminders of what had been.

American Chestnut trees used to be one of the predominant trees in the forest of the northeastern United States.  Then, in 1904, in the area of the Bronx Zoo, the first signs of Chestnut blight were noticed.  The great trees began dying, and the fungus spread out from there at a pace of about 50 miles per year.  It would not have taken long for it to reach the Smith farm.  Within a few decades, up to 3 billion American Chestnut trees in their native area were gone, killed by the blight.  

 Not all of the Chestnut trees died completely though.  Some of the more resistant ones kept sending shoots out from the base.  We have two of these near our swamp. 

October 17th

This is the larger of the two.  It has sent up many shoots over the years, but before they get very large, they succumb to the fungus and die. If the blight were not bad enough... some of them get eaten by beavers, as you can see in the next photo! 

Here you can see the effect of the blight on the live stem on the right, a dead trunk on the left, with some smaller (still healthy) limbs.

I've known this tree was here for a long time, but recently noticed another smaller one nearby.  Most of the trees around it had lost their leaves, so this small tree caught my eye.  The leaves are so long that they actually look almost palm-like. 

American Chestnuts must have been really wonderful trees when they were healthy.  They grew to almost 100 feet tall and up to 9 feet in diameter!

Their leaves are not all the same length.  Here's a photo showing some:

Those are all American Chestnut leaves.  Next, here's a photo with the most similar other leaves we have in our area - American Beech - to show how big those Chestnut leaves really are!  The two leaves on the left are Beech, the other two are Chestnut.

Here's our  tree on October 12th:

I'd love to see an American Chestnut tree like the one I imagine was over the Village Blacksmith.  I've recently read that there are a few stands of large trees and some large individual trees in places that were not part of their natural range.  These trees escaped the blight because they were isolated (though some apparently are fighting it now, too).  There is also a group of people who are trying to restore these trees called the American Chestnut Foundation.  Through breeding of resistant trees, they are working on growing disease resistant trees. 

"I think that I shall never see, 

A poem lovely as a tree" 

(by Joyce Kilmer) ... maybe someday I'll see one of those stately, healthy American Chestnut trees.  That would be lovely!