How Do You Restore a Chestnut Forest or an Apple Orchard? Very Slowly.

July 20, 2024 4:29 AM

This botanic garden is determined to bring back the American chestnut tree and heirloom apples that taste like those grown 500 years ago. It won’t be easy. Margaret Roach for the NYT. “When you operate a botanic garden, you hope that it’s here in perpetuity,” he said, and you work with that horizon in mind, not just the current year’s displays. “You expect that this property, that this garden is going to survive long past anyone who’s actively managing it.”
posted by bq (18 comments total)

Please post an archive.is or gift link.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 5:03 AM on July 20

This is a gift link (I think)
posted by bq at 5:09 AM on July 20

Please post an archive.is or gift link

Here's an archive.is link.

But there is no reason to wait for someone to do it for you - anybody can go to archive.is, press the button to generate a link, and post it here for others if you like. Depending on what browser you use, there are also extensions that will do it for you.
posted by trig at 5:43 AM on July 20 [10 favorites]

I await the day these trees help comprise an old-growth forest.
posted by Whale Oil at 7:28 AM on July 20 [1 favorite]

I love Margaret Roach’s essays. What a daunting task this one describes.

It’s great to restore old apple varieties. I’m also grateful for new ones. Pretty much all I ever got as a kid were Red Delicious, which are red, to be fair, but the second part of the name is a lie.
posted by zenzenobia at 7:29 AM on July 20 [4 favorites]

Anyone who has read Daniel Mason's North Woods will certainly be reminded of the book by this post about the chestnut tree and a wonderful heirloom apple.
posted by kozad at 7:57 AM on July 20

I was just in Cook Forest, PA last week and out of all the great old growth trees they have up there, what impressed me most was this chestnut snag. It's still standing there, 100 years after it died. It's so tall and distinctive I stopped in my tracks when I saw it from afar. It looks like a magical tree in a videogame, spiraling upwards. It was a profound thing to see.
posted by Catblack at 9:10 AM on July 20 [5 favorites]

As I type this, a crew of workers we hired are taking down a ridiculous amount of apple and pear trees that our slum-lord neighbor has on his property and has never pruned... or even picked. The trees aren't being removed, rather 30' of trunks, branches, etc that hang over our property and drop literally 1000+ pounds of rotting fruit in our walkway, our porches every year etc. No one on the slum-lord's property does anything to take care of these trees, so they've grown massive and weedy. We easily pick up and remove a hundred pounds of rotting fruit every week in late summer/early fall. Almost every fruit is damaged as it has fallen 15+ feet, or birds, squirrels and rats got to them. And the fallen fruit attracts vermin like crazy; swarms of fruit flies, wasps, rats, etc. It's impossible to remove all of them.

We've managed to snag several pears and apples that we've eaten over the last five years. The skins were tough but the fruit was delicious. But fruit trees need to be trimmed, pruned and managed if you want to be able to pick them and eat them.

Apple trees are not native in North America. And the trees that bear apples and pears that we commonly eat are not "wild" trees... they've been hybridized and genetically altered by humans for hundreds of years or maybe thousands. Let them just go? They will strain under the weight of their unnaturally large clusters of fruit. They will shade parts of themselves out and the inside of the canopy will die. More weak wood means more fallen broken branches.

Anyway, don't plant edible fruit trees on your property and then ignore them for 30 years. It's a gigantic mess.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:49 AM on July 20 [4 favorites]

I am a huge plant and tree enthusiast, gardener and houseplant person, by the way. I do not like manicured gardens or lawns of grass. I am in favor of the efforts in TFA! Not trying to be a buzz-kill. There are dwarf varieties of edible apples/pears you can grow that will not have nearly these kinds of problems. Research before you plant any kind of tree. I love the romantic idea of home grown fruit in my yard, but it is truly a lot of work to keep up with.
posted by SoberHighland at 9:57 AM on July 20 [2 favorites]

I recently bought a steam juicer, which is a device that may be useful to you. I mention it because despite canning fruit for 20 years I just learned they exist. I did a batch of apples and it was really divine juice.
posted by bq at 10:27 AM on July 20

Anyway, don't plant edible fruit trees on your property and then ignore them for 30 years. It's a gigantic mess.

As I understand it (and I’d love to hear from someone with a better grasp) most trees bearing recognizable varieties have that variety grafted on, and over time the rootstock tends to reassert itself and is generally not nearly as tasty.

But they might be better for cooking and storage as well as cider because really strong and off-putting flavors often seem to ferment into something rich and strange.
posted by jamjam at 11:57 AM on July 20 [2 favorites]

@jamjam I manage a commercial orchard, so I can answer your question with the inevitable, well, it's complicated.

Some fruiting trees are not grafted, for example figs, but most other varieties are. However it's not inevitable that the rootstock will take over the scions of the tasty varieties. With apples I rarely have to remove rootstock shoots, nor with pears, but with walnuts and plums it's an annual task.

@SoberHighland fwiw, those kinds of super abundant and tall fruit trees are very rarely planted anymore. Trends in fruit trees have moved to much more reasonable semi-dwarf or dwarf trees that are better behaved in a suburban setting.
posted by birdsongster at 12:14 PM on July 20 [6 favorites]

Well, I'm on the north side of Chicago in Edgewater and I wish someone had told the slum-lord about the dwarf varieties 30 years ago.

Happy to report that the offending branches, trunks and mess is mostly dealt with. We still have a lot of work to do cleaning up, and our perennials under this area got trashed. Going to cut them back and know they will be back and beautiful next year. Thinking about adding some more sun tolerant perennials there as the entire nature of the yard has changed with so much foliage removed. We also had a magnolia tree completely removed. It was slowly dying because someone planted it under towering trees on the street, and the thing just never got enough sun. So it was dying branch by branch, year by year. It's gone as are some other rotted and broken branches of overhanging street trees.

A tree is a commitment. You need to research and plan. And proper yearly cleanup and pruning is necessary. We are ecstatic that we will have very minimal fermenting apple/pear sludge cleanup for the next few years!
posted by SoberHighland at 12:57 PM on July 20 [2 favorites]

I’ve visited Tower Hill a few times and somehow missed that they were doing research. I look forward to the day we see American Chestnuts thriving again and can taste all those apples and some chestnuts.

For those in the area (not too far from Worcester, MA), the site is spectacular and well worth a visit.
posted by AMyNameIs at 1:04 PM on July 20

Anyone who has read Daniel Mason's North Woods will certainly be reminded of the book by this post about the chestnut tree and a wonderful heirloom apple.
posted by kozad at 7:57 AM on July 20 [+] [⚑]

I recently finished this book and indeed it was the first thing that sprang to mind! It is a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:58 PM on July 20

Tower Hill is great, I live about 45 minutes away and for many years as a stay-at-home dad I would take my kiddo and sometimes his friends there for a day trip. It's a fantastic place for all ages, cool trails with blooming flowers galore.

For those in the area (not too far from Worcester, MA), the site is spectacular and well worth a visit.

Pro tip for Mass residents, unless you're a member, the admission can feel a bit pricey ($20 for adults, $10 for kids).

However, many local libraries offer free day passes, although they are very popular so be prepared to plan ahead!
posted by jeremias at 2:12 PM on July 20

when we moved into our house, it had a HUGE mulberry tree in the backyard behind the very small garage. We found out quickly that it was basically impossible to properly pick the fruit to do anything with, as the tree branches extended all over the place, including over the garage.

But you know who did know how to properly harvest them? every bird in a several block area, who would then release purple colored, and staining everything it touched, poop. Several limbs also extended over the clothesline, so in addition to the poop, we'd get mulberry stains on our clothes. and the bird poop fertilized the seeds, as nature intended, so the whole neighborhood had rogue mulberry starters every spring.

and it was a productive tree, having berries ripen in waves for many weeks.

We did not cry when it got storm damaged and needed to be massively pruned back.
posted by jkosmicki at 2:22 PM on July 20

I attended a party in the neighbourhood this weekend, and was overjoyed to see a medlar tree in m hosts garden. A medlar is a very old type of fruit which has to be picked in December, and then allowed to rot before it’s edible. If you’re thinking “oh that sounds gross”, you’re not alone: however, this was one of the best fruits of the Middle Ages period. It apparently tastes terrible, and as soon as everybody could get fruit in winter delivered by ships, people stopped growing it. I love that these guys are keen on apples; it’s not the whole story, and we should ask ourselves why apples are so popular. In the meantime, I am looking forward to convincing my neighbours to eat rotten fruit this winter.
posted by The River Ivel at 3:41 PM on July 20 [1 favorite]