A little story about chestnuts... www.unionsentinel.com/news/2006/1116/home/056.html The two organizations mentioned in the article: accf-online.org/ The American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation www.acf.org/r_r.htm The American Chestnut Foundation The link below has links to all sorts of nut sites Since you are in Virginia, well I guess that would be dependant on where in Virginia you are, perhaps you would be interested in assisting the ACF in its efforts.... The ACF maintains a breeding/testing farm near Meadowview, Va. Not too far from the I-77/I-81 junction near Wytheville, Va and also not to far from the Johnson City/Bristol/Kingsport area either. More than a very few years ago I spent some time with the ACF genetisist Dr. Fred Hebard (I think we were both just a little bit younger back then) wandering about some of the most out of the way places in western Virginia and eastern WV collecting genetic material and hand pollenating and bagging chestnuts "in the wild". There are some, but not a lot of them "out there". And also, a nice bunch of folks with a very good site, vendors tools trees people learn etc..... www.northernnutgrowers.org/ Hope this stuff is of some use to you. Here is a link that might be useful: Chestnut links

Should work OK. Much the same method has been used to select the hybrids in the first place. Resin

The college is not a secret, its SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, where I am currently finishing my undergrad. I've gotten to know some of the professors working on this project over the years and they have been working very hard on getting this to be a success and are very friendly people. I took a tissue culture course that was taught by some of the people working on the project and got to see firsthand some of the laboratory difficulties and challenges that had to be overcome to make it work. Elm grows like a weed in terms of micropropagation but chestnut is an absolute nightmare! Resin- I beleive the gene used in the chestnut project came from a species of Wheat that just happened to have some sort of natural mechanism for fighting a similar pathogen, and it happened to work. There may in fact be a group of genes being used, I have no formal training in genetics and was never introduced to that aspect of the project. For the elms I beleive this is the case, as there are several different diseases attacking them that needed to be addressed (i.e. elmy yellows, blight). I don't know too much about that project, although as part of the field trials several of the "immune" plants were planted in a group with "baseline" american elms in front of our campus library. they are monitored 24 hours a day for both security and to compare their growth to the normal seedling elms. Only the professors know which is which. Some of the biogengineered elms come from a few plants that were found thriving in the nearby solvay wastebeds in absolutely atrocious, dry, polluted, compacted conditions- the idea being that our trees should be quite urban-tolerant!

I'm reviving an old thread, humbly suggesting that those of you who are interested in American gardening check out the recent info. regarding the American chestnut. This used to be the dominant hardwood tree of Eastern North America, and various state chapters of the American Chestnut Foundation are in various stages of progress toward reintroducing this wonderful tree to the Eastern American forest. The Massachusetts/Rhode Island chapter's link is here, but other states have their own chapters (deliberately so, since this will help preserve the species' genetic diversity). Check them out if you are at all interested in helping to restore this hugely ecologically significant tree, the one mentioned in Longfellow's poem "The Village Smithy" ("Under a spreading chestnut tree ..."). In Virginia we are apparently within just five years of reintroduction! This was a tree at least as rot resistant as redwood, with timber just as good. It was a wonderful timber tree, producing a long bole, with limbs high up, so there were lots of board feet of highly rot-resistant timber. It also was a fine furniture wood (even used for making musical instruments). If it was still around those of us in the East would not be using redwood for the decks of our houses, but American chestnut. You can help restore this tree to our land, and soon (within 10 or 15 years, or maybe less)!