Church-related college establishes chestnut orchard

A couple of decades after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote of "a spreading chestnut tree" in his poem "The Village Blacksmith," many of the American chestnut trees across the country were dead or dying from a blight. Juniata College is playing a small part in trying to bring the species back by creating a chestnut orchard on campus.

Juniata is a Church of the Brethren-related college in Huntingdon, Pa. While the college lacks a village smithy to place the chestnut trees near, it does have a grassy area behind Brumbaugh Academic Center.

That is where Uma Ramakrishnan, assistant professor of environmental science, will oversee a 25,000-square-foot plot (a bit more than half an acre) of 120 trees in a collaborative project between the college and the American Chestnut Foundation. Eventually the college will add 90 more trees.

"The orchard will be used for research on a variety of factors concerning the American chestnut, as well as other chestnut species," said Ramakrishnan. "We will have multiple species of chestnut in the orchard and hopefully this will become a spot where we can not only do research, but also bring in classes from secondary and elementary schools."

Ramakrishnan said the college was to plant about 120 seeded plants on or around April 3. Juniata's facilities staff plowed up the area, creating an orchard space about 20 feet from the tree line surrounding the meadow and distributed 15 to 20 feet apart.

This year, the college is planting four species: the pure American chestnut, the Chinese chestnut, a hybrid American chestnut (crossbred with a disease resistant Chinese chestnut) and the European chestnut.

"We also would like to plant the Japanese chestnut and the Chinquapin, a native chestnut species, next year," Ramakrishnan said.

Once the trees are planted, Ramakrishnan and a team of Juniata environmental science students will monitor the stand of trees, pesticide and fungicide treatments, reproduction, nut production and other factors.

Prior to 1900, the American chestnut was one of the dominant hardwood trees in American forests, used for furniture, lumber and other products. The trees easily grew 100 to 150 feet high and could reach 10 feet in diameter.

After the turn of the century, botanists noted that chestnuts were afflicted with chestnut blight, a disease caused by an Asian bark fungus. The disease was introduced through imported Chinese chestnuts, which were, and still are, resistant to the blight. Within a decade or two, billions of American chestnuts died off. It is estimated that 25 percent of the Appalachian forest had been composed of chestnuts.

Ramakrishnan is a wildlife biologist by training and was originally approached by Rick Entriken, a local representative for the American Chestnut Foundation. Entriken donated seeds for the project and has acted as an adviser for chestnut growing. He also manages a chestnut orchard near Raystown Lake for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The care and research of the orchard will be in the hands of Ashley Musgrove, a senior student from Cumberland, Md. She will research and implement methods to protect the young trees from deer and work with a team of other students for management of the orchard.

The Church of the Brethren is a Christian denomination committed to continuing the work of Jesus peacefully and simply, and to living out its faith in community.

Story written by John Wall and provided by Worldwide Faith News.