Page:Tree Crops (1953).pdf/158

 Sometimes there is vigor to send up a second crop of shoots, and sometimes a third and a fourth. Thus, these trees that began to blight thirty-five or even forty years ago still live. What is much more important, some of them produce seed.

If I could be granted an extra century or two of life and enough income to employ three or four helpers, I strongly suspect that, with the necessary land and equipment, I could (if I stuck at it) produce an effective blight-resistant strain of the American chestnut. I would do this by planting, generation after generation, the seed of the most resistant descendants of these tough specimens that have already resisted the blight enough to live with it for a third of a century.

Some people think that the American chinkapin, Castanea pumila, a diminutive (bush) species of chestnut, is the survivor of a larger species that was ravaged by some blight in past epochs yet managed to survive in the dwarf form. Chinkapins blight to some degree, but they keep on sending up enough suckers to be prosperously productive, and they keep this up.

This blight came from eastern Asia, where the Chinese and the Japanese chestnuts have been exposed to it for an unknown period of time and have developed varying degrees of blight resistance.

The spectacular Japanese chestnut had been introduced to this country by private individuals several decades before the blight came. However, upon the appearance of the blight, the U. S. Department of Agriculture acted with wisdom and promptness. It imported seed of the Chinese chestnut, raised seedlings, and distributed them far and wide for tests; and now, after nearly forty years of this testing, these trees are growing and producing nuts from southern Alabama to northeastern Massachusetts and in hundreds of localities between, also in many places west of the Alleghenies in scattered locations as far west as Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas.

It is but natural that all this should produce a rapidly rising interest in planting these trees. It is also but natural to expect that this species, like almost every other species of tree, varies