Saturday, 8:00 AM. 62 degrees, wind WNW, light. The channel, like myself, is gray and wrinkled. It has been raining lightly but will hopefully clear and the weather cooperate for the Bayfield Arts Festival, the Washburn Brownstone Days, and the Iron River Blueberry Festival, all occurring this weekend.
The American chestnut tree Castanea dentata, was once a major component of the Eastern Deciduous Forest of North America. It was said that a squirrel could travel from the East Coast to the Mississippi jumping from chestnut tree to chestnut tree, and never touch the ground. It was almost totally wiped out by chestnut blight, a Eurasian disease, over a century ago. There are here and there surviving pockets of chestnut trees, possibly either disease resistant or just very isolated, and there is one such enclave on the Apostle View Golf Course outside of Bayfield. The tree pictured is an offspring from that group. Chestnut trees are beautiful in bloom, the flowers having a not unpleasant, earthy odor. The female flowers are very small, the male flowers very showy, both on the same tree. The nuts of course are very good. The old poem The Village Blacksmith by Longfellow with the lines, “under the spreading chestnut tree,” I have been told memorializes the European chestnut, not our own, but our own certainly spreads every bit as much, and hopefully some day truly resistant American chestnut trees will be discovered and will spread once more. Chestnut trees are usually killed to the roots by the disease, and new stump sprouts can grow quite tall, but then die back to the stump again. A lot of research has been done on the disease and a lot of breeding, but to date success has been incomplete.
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