The region’s latest hope for undoing one of the America’s worst near-extinctions is not, it must be admitted, terribly impressive.

“It’s not much of a tree to look at: Kind of scraggly, at the most 4 inches in diameter,” Curt Laffin, of Hudson, said about a flowering American chestnut tree found near Alvirne High School and Hills Garrison Elementary School.

But looks aren’t everything. Consider a handsome 90-foot American chestnut tree discovered in south Hudson woods in 2010, which was the subject of a major pollination effort that produced 194 chestnuts to help regenerate a species that has been virtually destroyed by a blight caused by a fungus from Asia.

“We went back the next year and it was dead,” Laffin said. “We still have the lumber from it. I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it – there are fundraising opportunities.”

Laffin thinks the smaller tree found by a town resident while strolling in the woods isn’t long for this world, either. He isn’t even certain it will produce flowers this year.

“It has some blight,” Lafin said. “But it did flower last year.”

As he explained Wednesday to Mike Gagnon’s forest and wildlife management class in the Palmer Technical Center at Alvirne, those flowers provide hope.

If they return this year, the flowers will be hand-pollinated with pollen produced by trees that are a mix of American chestnut and Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to the blight. They’ll be individually covered with bags so that other pollen can’t interfere while the chestnuts grow.

In the fall, those nuts will be harvested to help create another line of trees being grown and tested in hopes of finding the best combination of American chestnut looks and quality along with Chinese chestnut resistance.

“The students are going to help do the controlled pollination,” Gagnon said. “We’ve been put to the task of checking on it, time the flowering. We hope to get some to plant in front of the school, see how they do.”

The class participated in the 2011 planting of a number of the eight blight-resistant chestnut trees at Benson Park.

The American chestnut was once one of the major hardwoods in forests throughout eastern America, feeding wildlife with its chestnuts and the lumber industry with its handsome, durable wood, until a fungus arrived from Asia in the 1930s.

Within two decades, the species was virtually extinct because of the disease, which has lingered in the environment and kills off most sprouts growing from dead chestnuts just as they’re getting old enough to flower.

Laffin is a driving force in local efforts to bring the American chestnut tree back to our forests, along with the American Chestnut Foundation. The foundation is slowly cross-breeding blight-resistant cultivars on a half-dozen farms in New Hampshire and Vermont, including one at the Beaver Brook Association in Hollis, as well as other farms throughout the country.

Nationally, the program has achieved a sixth-generation chestnut – that is, one which has been crossed and recrossed between American and Chinese chestnut trees six times, with blight-sensitive trees weeded out each generation in hopes of strengthening resistance.

This is considered enough of a mix that thousands of those trees are now being planted throughout mid-Atlantic states as a controlled experiment to see how well they do.

In northern New England, the chestnut program has gotten only to the fourth generation of cross-breeding.

“We have to go through two more generations,” Laffin said. “Probably the next growing season, we will inoculate the oldest trees with blight. Most will die; those showing the most resistance, their nuts will be harvested and pollinated with each other.”

That slow, laborious process has a goal in mind, not just to develop one blight-resistant American chestnut line, but to develop a number of different blight-resistant strains, developed in different climates, to maximize future hardiness.

“We are trying to develop 20 different lines from successful trees in New Hampshire and Vermont,” Laffin said.

The 2010 pollination in Hudson produced enough chestnuts for one line; Laffin hopes that the Alvirne tree, combined with another flowering chestnut tree found near Massabesic Lake, will produce enough nuts to create another line.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531, dbrooks@nashua
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Geek.