Thursday, February 23, 2012

American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree

I’ve just finished reading a wonderfully well-written and informative book about blight and the loss of American chestnut trees. The disappearance of chestnut trees was a real loss for farmers and rural folk, particularly in the western part of North Carolina. American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by science journalist Susan Frienkel gives you a complete picture of the problem, from its impact on people to the work done by scientists, dedicated volunteers, and the American Chestnut Foundation to develop a resistant chestnut tree. The book was published by the University of California Press in 2007.

See The American Chestnut Foundation’s web site, www.acf.org, for more recent information. I found two 2011 articles on resistant American chestnuts from North Carolina newspapers:
“Tree Planting Near Asheville Part of Hope for American Chestnut,” from the Asheville Citizen-Times:
“New Hope for a Vanished Giant” from the Charlotte Observer:

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