The following article was written by Richard Evans, Forest Resources Center Director, for the UT Arboretum Society Journal, The Leaflet Vol. 21, No. 2.

It probably goes without saying, that in my position at the UT Forestry Experiment Station and Arboretum I get a lot of questions about plants, mostly about trees. Many of the questions are what you might expect. They are about tree culture, care, identification, insects, diseases, etc. I really enjoy answering these questions, although the task may take valuable time away from the sometimes more mundane business duties of the operation.

Answering these questions (or, sometimes trying to) keeps me on my toes, professionally, and in contact with the problems that are important to our constituents and supporters. In these situations, I have found one question that invariably comes up if the conversation lingers beyond the point of a simple answer. In that moment, just before a normal conversation would draw to a close, the inquirer usually springs the question – “What about the American chestnut?” It is at that point that I wish I had a prerecorded response that I could play at the touch of a button.

All plant enthusiasts are eager for information about the American chestnut, particularly about the efforts to develop a blight resistant chestnut. This interest has not gone un-noticed at the Arboretum. There are several exhibits that feature the chestnut – a leaf display in the visitor’s lobby, an information kiosk at the head of the Lost Chestnut Trail and of course, the Lost Chestnut Trail, itself.

These displays serve to highlight the life, and death, of the American chestnut, as well as, tell the story of its importance as a component of our forest in those bygone years. Very few remnants of chestnuts can be found in today’s forest. There are only the occasional sprouts and an ever-dwindling number of decaying stumps and logs.

Chestnut's wood is highly decay resistant and, not so many years ago, stumps and logs were prominent features of our forest at the Arboretum. The site for the location of our Lost Chestnut Trail was chosen for that reason. At the time the trail was established (1975) there were numerous stumps that littered the woods adjacent to the trail. A favorite game to play with visiting school groups was to ask how many chestnut stumps could they identify on their trek around the trail. The magic number was “26”. Today, the game is not worth playing. For a keen observer the number might be only three. Time, weather and natural processes have taken their toll and, the “largest stump of them all”, is only a few pieces of solid wood and a mound of duff, as dramatized in the accompanying photographs.

The sadness in the loss of these remnant stumps and logs in our forest is only a comment on the history that I’ve observed in my relatively short association with this property. The loss of this tangible evidence of the once mighty chestnut does not compare to the loss of the tree species, yet, is sad nonetheless. History has a way of revealing our mistakes and teaching us a lesson, but only if we are observant and mindful of the experience.

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