To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] small chestnut trees
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:28:16 -0600
Hans,
I have some seedlings that came from a half Chinese half chinkapin
crossed back to chinkapin. They aren't bearing yet, and I don't know how
blight resistant they will prove to be. They came from a NAFEXer in Z7 who
got the original cross from another NAFEXer in Z7. They have small long
leaves and start branching low, obviously on their way to being large shrubs
instead of trees. (There is one that apparently backcrossed to chinese
chestnut, it's leaves and stems are much larger) One other seedling from
another source bloomed last year and made one small nut that I missed
getting. That one is about 8 ft tall. We do have wild chinks here in Z6, I
have seen and even dug some, but they do get blight. The area I have been
shown that still has living, bearing chinks is very unusual because the
blight has really reduced the chink population through most of the south. I
am concerned that there is a gall wasp that is making it's way north toward
us, and am hoping that my trees start bearing before it arrives, also I hope
that SOMEONE with more time and experience than me save some of the local
chinkapin population.
There was a clone called "S-8 Jap", sometimes referred to as "Essate
Jap" produced I think by Dr. Van Fleet when he worked at Beltsville or
selected by him or more likely by a successor. I think it was a chink cross
crossed to C. crenata, tends to make a small tree. I am told it was
propagated in the south and is found here and there in older collections of
plants. Since these crosses occurred back in the early 1900's, I would be
quite surprised if someone in Europe didn't have a copy of the clone. This
is the only quote I can find on the net referring to it:
" Our first records of crosses between chestnut species typify the whole
history of chestnut breeding in the U.S.: the work was done by both an
interested amateur and by a professional botanist. George W. Endicott of
Villa Ridge, Illinois, was growing `Japan Giant' at the end of the last
century, and used pollen from an American chestnut tree to produce Japanese
X American hybrids in 1895. One of these hybrids produced six burs in its
second year, and was named `Daniel Boone'. This variety was strongly
self-fertile, which is rare in chestnut (11). The other early hybridization
work was done by Dr. Walter Van Fleet, then an associate editor of the Rural
New Yorker Magazine. In 1894 he used pollen of American chestnut on flowers
of the European (or European-American) cultivar `Paragon' and planted the
progeny in Little Silver, New Jersey (12). Van Fleet went on to make
thousands of crosses, using many species, between 1900 and 1921. For his
early crosses he used the native chinquapin, C. pumila and European and
Japanese cultivars. In his later work he included Chinese chestnuts, C.
mollissima Bl. Wild seed of "Castanea species" collected in Tientsin, China,
were imported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (as PI#34517) and
planted in 1912 at their Bell (Maryland) Experimental Plot. Van Fleet had
over 900 of these trees to observe and use there, in addition to subsequent
importations made by the USDA plant explorer Frank N. Meyer. Van Fleet's S-8
(its row and tree location in the nursery) was crossed by Arthur Graves in
Connecticut with a forest-type Japanese to produce the cultivar 'Essate Jap'.
Van Fleet 's records on the parents of S-8 are not entirely clear, but the
female parent was given as C. pumila from Virginia (or Washington) and the
male parent as pollen from "several named varieties of Japan chestnut
including 'Parry's Giant', 'Killen', and 'Hale'." H. Nienstaedt concluded in
his 1948 thesis that it looked more like C. crenata X C. pumila, based on
the results of other crosses of these two species (9)."
There is a rather interesting article to be found on the Net, a translation
of a Chinese document on chestnuts in China. If you'd like to have a look,
it is here:
http://chestnut.cas.psu.edu/PDFs/Journals/Ban_Li.pdf Wow, I just looked
at it again myself, it is VERY interesting, stuff like which part of the
tree to collect scions from for best results. I have NOT tried grafting
chestnuts because they are said to be so finicky. Oh, I take that back, I
did put some of the Giant Chink (the original cross that my seedlings came
from) on some chinese seedlings. I used a bark graft and every one took
nicely, some even put out catkins, and then every one died in a month or
two. They say if you want success, to graft onto seedlings of the tree you
take scions from. Donna