American Chestnut trees have new hope through cross-breed By JULE HUBBARD Staff A 30-foot-tall American chestnut tree near Sheets Gap Road in Union Township of northern Wilkes County near the Alleghany County line is being used to help bring this once dominant species back to the forests of Western North Carolina and elsewhere. Male flowers (catkins) from a 10-year-old blight-resistant tree at the American Chestnut Foundation farm near Abingdon, Va., were physically brushed against female flowers on the Wilkes tree for cross-pollination on Thursday. Using a bucket truck from Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corp. in Jefferson, the work was done by Dr. Paul Sisco of the foundation and BREMCO employees Larry Carson and Greg Miller. BREMCO provided the truck and manpower at no charge. After brushing each female flower with a catkin, a waterproof corn pollination bag was pulled over the flower and tied to hold the flower and catkin together. Sisco said this was done to make sure pollination occurred only with the blight-resistant catkins and not from some other surviving American chestnut.

Birds-Eye View — Greg Miller of Blue Ridge Electric in Jefferson brushes male flowers (called catkins) of an American chestnut against female flowers on the top of a 30-foot tree off Sheets Gap Road in northern Wilkes County near the Alleghany line and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Bags were tied over the female flowers, holding the catkins with them, for cross-pollination.

"Every 10th bag has a flower that wasn't pollinated as a control bag to make sure we successfully pollinated the others with the tree we wanted" from Virginia, said Sisco, a former North Carolina State University professor with a background in corn genetics.

Catkins used Thursday are from a tree that is 87.5 percent pure American chestnut. It is the third generation of a process that began with cross-pollination of a 100 percent Chinese chestnut tree with a 100 percent American chestnut tree. Chinese chestnuts are highly-resistant from a fungus that essentially wiped out the American chestnuts since it was first noticed at the Bronx Zoo in New York City in 1904.

Each new generation of trees in this process is cross-pollinated with surviving American chestnut trees like the one near Sheets Gap Road to produce increasingly pure American chestnut trees, but with the blight-resistant trait of the Chinese chestnut.

Sisco said the work done Thursday with the tree near Sheets Gap Road is being repeated this year with about nine other American chestnut survivors in western North Carolina.

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