By Andrew Lupton
Conservationists hope to use rare tree to help bring back species wiped out by blight.
Dan Brinkman — a self-described tree nerd — knew he'd hit the jackpot when he was told about a certain tree standing in a cattle pasture near Mount Brydges.
To most, the tree looks like any other. But to Brinkman, a stewardship technician with the Lower Thames Valley Conservation Authority, he was pretty certain this was an American chestnut, a species that once thrived in southern Ontario but has been nearly wiped out by blight in the past century.
"You read in the books about how rare it is and how small most of them are, just a sprout coming off a stump, and to find a tree without a spec of blight on it, that's like going for a hike in China and seeing a panda bear cross the path in front of you. It's there, you just don't expect to see that."
It's believed that up to two million American chestnuts once grew in southern Ontario's Carolinian zone, a stretch of land that covers much of the area from Lake Huron to Lake Erie. But blight, an insidious tree-killing fungus, has nearly doomed the species. It's believed there are only about 2,000 wild American chestnuts left in Ontario. Most found are suckers sprouting up from a stump or hybrids mixed with other chestnut species. But a fully grown chestnut tree about 70 years old and 15 metres (50 feet) tall? That's rare, with only three reported in Middlesex County.
"This tree, it defied the odds," said Brinkman. "It's a survivor."
