Chestnuts and Chainsaw Bears

Since there hasn't been much progress to show lately on the house, we thought we'd throw in some information on a couple of things related to our house and property. While hiking to the top of our property recently, we discovered an old chestnut stump that was part of the property line that runs across our ridge top. A chesnut blight killed all the mature American Chestnut trees back in the 1920s and 30s. To this day, the blight kills off almost all newly spouted chestnuts when they reach about 15'. When we started looking closer at our chestnut stump, we noticed the fallen chestnut tree was still partly intact and that a number of baby chestnut trees have sprouted from the roots of the old tree. As we started to look further, we discovered some other fallen old chestnut trees and more baby trees. We sent these pictures to the American Chestnut Foundation, which is sponsoring efforts to try to breed a hardier version of the tree that can survive the blight, and they confirmed that these are indeed baby chestnut trees. They told us such sprouts can be found in this area at elevations higher than 3000 ft. The scientists start to get interested in these surviving trees when they are tall enough to flower and reproduce. We'll keep an eye on ours in the coming years and see how they are doing. In the picture below, you see a close up of the leaf cluster of one of the sprouting trees.


In the center of this picture, you can see a number of the young trees sprouting around one of the fallen chestnut trees. The pink tape is surveyor's tape since this stump is a property line marker.

This is a closeup of one of the old fallen chestnut trees. Although the outside is rotted, the inner wood looks to still be good. The fact that this tree has probably been dead for 70 or 80 years is a testament to the rot resistance of the wood. Someday when we feel like lugging a chain saw up the mountain, we might try to reclaim some of this chestnut wood. We are already using reclaimed wormy chestnut wood for our fireplace mantel and our foyer flooring, but we could probably find a place to use some more...especially if it comes from our own property.

A few weeks ago we decided to get a chain saw Welcome Bear for our new house. We ordered a bear from a chainsaw artist in Maggie Valley, NC (Jacob Marzullo) and today we went to pick him up. He will sit on the porch of our current house until we move.

When we went to pick our bear up, we snapped a picture of the artist in action on another bear.

Here Cheryl poses with some of the other bears waiting for homes.

In fact, there was a whole colony of bears looking for homes.