Welcome To … The Chestnut City?

The long empty and frequently flooding Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) grassy field adjacent to the Ethnic Heritage Center at 270 Fitch St. is empty no longer.

Tuesday morning it was planted with eight little seeds that students and staff hope will grow into mighty chestnut trees as part of a new ​“demonstration orchard.”

That ​“demonstration orchard” is one of a handful in a project coordinated by the local chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF). The goal of the project is to create an American chestnut that will be resistant to a fungus that is still so virulent. There are perhaps only 1,000 American chestnuts left in Connecticut, and they are isolated and struggling.

That’s why beneath a bright sun on Tuesday morning, SCSU biochemistry professor Rachel Jeffrey, who leads the project, was calling out to a half dozen students and staff to ​“bring out the babies.”

The botanical infants in question were eight or so chestnuts harvested from Salem, Niantic, and elsewhere around the state out of which a tiny curving pale green shoot, which with luck and watering, and if the voles can be successfully deterred by stout plastic grow tubes and fencing, will one day transform into the trunk of a mighty tree.

Helping her in the planting of the seeds were SCSU students Josh Hays and Alina Tran whom Jeffrey and SCSU Special Project Coordinator Derek Faulkner and the offices of sustainability and research and innovation at the school helped connect to the foundation for fascinating field work last summer.

Once known as the ​“sequoias of the East,” American chestnuts were wiped out in the 1920s, Jeffrey said, by a fungal blight that struck about a decade before another disease wiped out the city’s elms.

Chestnuts were not only roasted over the proverbial holiday fires, they were carpenters’ and shipbuilders’ preferred lumber as the trees grow tall and fast, are rot-resistant and don’t branch until about 20 or 30 feet high.

They provided habitat for insects and animals — tree frogs’ own babies, their tadpoles, were fed, Jeffrey explained, by falling chestnut leaves — and chestnuts were a huge resource for native populations, then the arriving English colonists.

“A staple crop for the whole ecosystem,” Jeffrey put it as she supervised the students digging 18- to 24-inch holes to plant the ​“babies” in.

Driving across the state beginning last summer, Hays and Tran were working on a different aspect of the chestnut revival, using modest means to help chestnuts pollinate.

Since the surviving chestnuts are often isolated — and they rarely self-pollinate — the students (Hays is a graduating senior and Tran is earning a master’s degree in marine biology) found themselves hiking through jungle-level brush and slinging ropes high up into the branches of trees. 

Then they attached half-gallon milk jugs to the ropes where they collected the catkins on the trees.

The catkins are clusters that contain the pollen which they then, in subsequent visits, transport, like chestnut midwives, to the flower of another isolated tree, perhaps 40 miles away, to maximize possibility for reproduction.

The hope is, said Faulkner, that the new site will become home to more trees that can be planted and more aspects of the chestnuts’ biology and chemistry can be studied by SCSU students over the coming years.

“We have people who study fungal infection in soils,” said Jeffrey, and there are courses in biological illustration that lend themselves to field study and close examination, for example, of chestnut leaf structure.

As Faulkner set down a five-gallon bucket of water, which he hauled from Beaver Brook to water the baby chestnuts, he looked out on the field and imagined what he called an experiential classroom, and with it, more opportunities for SCSU students to graduate into the science job field with real field work under their belts.

“We hiked through vines,” Hays recalled one outing he and Tran were on to reach a chestnut deep on the property of the Connecticut Water Company. He said he had to throw down logs to cross over impassable sections.

Then, when they reached the intended tree, blighted but still alive, they implemented a technique pioneered by Jack Swatt at TACF: heaving that line over high branches to attach the milk jugs and water that would enable them to collect the pollen-filled catkins.

But the trees are so high, Hays had to acquire an industrial style sling shot to get the rope high enough in many instances.

Even using such comparatively primitive means (Jeffrey, in the old fashioned manner, used to collect pollen on slides, she said, and freeze it), ​“we got similar outcomes with the jug.”

The next step is to have a formal ribbon cutting of the ​“demonstration orchard” in the fall, when the students are back.

Faulkner was also pleased with the sign just erected on the property’s edge. It’s visible from Fitch Street, will help promote community engagement, he said, in a project that has the potential to do not only important scientific work but to capture the imagination of the community.

Jeffrey has 30 trees growing in her back yard in an orchard she manages for TACF. Planted only five years ago, they are already, she reported, taller than she is.