October 19, 2013
American Chestnut Cultivar (Cantanea dentata)
Once the most outstanding tree in the forests of the eastern United States, these woodland giants succumbed to an Asian fungal disease called chestnut blight that was introduced in 1904. Today there are virtually no mature chestnuts, although trees still sprout from surviving roots and live for a few years. The tree in this photo, growing in the Butterfly Meadow, is a cultivar that has been crossed with a blight-resistant Asian chestnut, and back-crossed so that it contains mostly genes of our native, and the resistance genes of the Asian species.