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| BAYFIELD RASPBERRIES ARE RIPE... |
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| ...ON SALE AND DELICIOUS! |
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| YOUNG AMERICAN CHESTNUT IN BLOOM ON CORNER OF 10TH ST. AND MANYPENNY AVE. |
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| ...FLOWER SPIKES OF AMERICAN CHESTNUT... |
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| ...AMERICAN CHESTNUT LEAF |
Bayfield's raspberry crop is ripening, and we bought the first berries of the season yesterday at Rocky Acres berry farm on Hwy. J. The picked price is $4.00 a quart, or save some money and pick your own. Bayfield's fruit crop has been excellent so far this year. Sweet cherries are still available at Apple Hill Orchard at the corner of Hwys. J and I.
We have reported before on Bayfield's rare, remnant American Chestnut trees and shall do so again. They are in full bloom at present, the earthy-smelling greenish to creamy white flowers adorning a number of trees, large and small. A very large, double-trunked tree can be seen on the corner of 7th and Manypenny Ave., and a young tree, propagated and planted by former Bayfield volunteer forester Howard Larsen, is on the corner of Tenth and Manypenny. There is a large tree in a ravine on the grounds of Spring Hill B&B on Hwy. J just west of its junction with Hwy. 13, and it is large enough to be seen in flower from the road. There reportedly is a stand of chestnuts on the Apostle Highlands Golf Course further up the same ravine.
American chestnuts, Castanea dentata, in the beech family (Fagaceae) were a dominant tree of the eastern and southeastern North American deciduous forest until the invasive chestnut blight erupted a hundred years ago. At that time one in four trees in that forest were American chestnut, and they rapidly died off.
The chestnut is valuable for its durable and beautiful wood, for its sweet, edible nuts and its ecological significance. The blight spreads readily by wind and by vectors, including man, and at this point there is no known cure. It is believed that the disease was inadvertently introduced from Asia, where the Chinese chestnut has developed natural resistance to it. The disease causes bark cankers which kill the tree above the the canker. Infected trees often sprout from the base of the tree so there are still chestnut trees to be found, but they are almost always diseased. The Bayfield trees are not infected and that makes them an interesting and perhaps important rarity.
At this point I am not aware of anybody studying the Bayfield trees, and do not know whether they are either immune or resistant to the disease, or simply are isolated enough that they have never been infected.
Current efforts to develop resistant varieties of American chestnuts and also to combat the disease itself have been undertaken by the American Chestnut Society as well as various universities and other public entities, including the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which monitors a large stand of the trees near LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Bayfield is at the extreme northwestern edge of the original range of the American Chestnut, and the small number of trees here may have been a natural outlier population or may have been planted by homesteaders. I doubt there is any way to accurately know their actual history.
It might be feasible to mount a successful campaign to use more of the Bayfield chestnuts as street and park trees, but a lot of trees would attract a lot of interest and a much greater chance of introducing the disease to the small population we presently have, so without a lot of further knowledge it does not seem to me to be a viable concept.
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