Decimating Any Castanea Standing

 

I am certainly not the first.  Of the millions of people who read “The Overstory” where they spend the early section describing enormous chestnut trees and the great chestnut blight that ran through the stately North American chestnut community decimating any castanea standing in this part of the country during the first decades of the last century.  I can remember chestnut trees when I was a kid in Westchester and I never thought much about it or considered them a fleeting concern.  The Chinese certainly have lizi chestnuts for sale, though I can’t quite cognate where such a tree might be growing within the sixth ring road of Beijing.  These Chinese trees are blight resistant, thought the nuts aren’t quite the same.  I looked into getting my own chestnut and found “revival” chestnuts for sale at the we-seem-to-have-most-trees-available-for-order-at-whatever-height-you-need:  Ty Ty Nursery in the state of Georgia.  Today my two six-to-seven-foot chestnut trees arrived.

Yes, I got two.  Again, “The Overstory.” Patricia Westerford suggested trees talk.  The real- life Patricia Westerford, Dr. Suzanne Simard has a nonfiction work coming out this May trying to scientifically prove that trees carry on benevolent and other communication between species, within the species.  Down on the trail I marvel at sycamores that were planted six feet apart that now appear to be one enormous tree.  So even though the plantation planters you read about online tell you to give them lots of space, I dug two holes less than ten feet apart. It was an afterthought really, that every site you looked at reminded you that you’d need at least two trees to have them ever successfully bear fruit, or nuts as it were. 

 

Fortunately, I still have the youthful naïveté required to pick up a shovel and dig two fifty-gallon holes into a shelf of shale and wrist sized roots.  Apparently, these guys like an incline.  And though I’d considered plotting them a few feet from the porch or a view of them out the bedroom window, I thought it best to allow the Mrs. the right of plotting the physical location.  They now have a central shot to the canopy on the sunny side of the street at least twenty feet from any other tree, but surrounded, surely but some fifty-year old pin oaks and sugar maples who didn’t seem particularly pleased to welcome this pair. 

Later, my legs were achy.  My lower back felt stiff and I thought of myself out there, slamming by foot down on to rocks, forcing them out and it wasn’t a youthful ache at all.  The water is already pretty soggy but we watered them and I tried to welcome them.  They haven’t got any branches yet.  There are certainly no leaves or buds.  Patience.  I’d better go clean off.  Tonight’s my 24^th anniversary and I suggested we’d do pick up from Lombardi’s in Gardiner.  

Friday, 03/19/21