Help Plant An American Chestnut Orchard For Arbor Day (Well, Technically The Next Day — Saturday 4-27 10-1)

Arbor Day:  Plant Native Trees and A Lot of Them!

Post Arbor Day, on Saturday, April 27th, 10-1, come help The Long Island Conservancy as we plant an American Chestnut orchard at Meadow Croft, the historic John Roosevelt estate resting in a fork in Brown’s River between Sayville and Bayport.

For The Long Island Conservancy, Arbor Day is not just a day or week, but is year round. The Long Island Conservancy is engaged in an ongoing effort to plant native at Meadow Croft, and to remove invasive ones.  We are also spearheading the effort to return this majestic tree to our forests.    A hundred years ago, there were an estimated 3-4 billion of these forest giants up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

American Chestnuts For Arbor Day

A Chinese Chestnut Tree, imported by the New York Zoological Society, now The Bronx Zoo, carried with it a fungal blight that our chestnuts had no immunity against.  Thus within a couple of decades, we lost what were our keystone ‘forest feeders,’ with the oaks now performing that task in our forests.   The vanishing of the American Chestnut, though, changed our forest ecology, and in ways we are still discovering.

Arbor Day:  Hope From Above

The Long Island Conservancy, with the assistance of Nico Nantsis, an intrepid soul you can see in this film, gather the remnant chestnuts.  They are then hand-pollinated. There are too few American Chestnuts left for windblown pollen.

From there, the chestnuts are hand pollinated, then grown into saplings, that are then planted in clusters of eight (orchards) around various strategic locations throughout Long Island.  Do you have a candidate place for an orchard?  Let us know below!  You can also read about our restoration efforts here.

Arbor Day: Bring Back Our Ancient Trees

Here at Meadow Croft, we plan to revive this important foundational species by planting an orchard.  After we hand pollinate their chestnuts in turn, using a pollen that will confer blight resistance, to the half that will be female,  it will be their offspring will be chestnut blight resistant, and will be a local ecotype or strain of the American Chestnut.  Long Island had an estimated 100000 American Chestnuts.  It’s a local goal to shoot for.   Let’s get back to roasting those chestnuts by an open fire, or imagine that they are in our Thanksgiving stuffing.

American Chestnuts For Arbor Day:  Volunteer!

We invite volunteers for “American Chestnuts For Arbor Day.”  Come to learn and to take part in the generational effort to return this forest giant to Long Island and beyond!   

The True Meaning of Arbor Day

Where ever you find yourself on Arbor Day, plant native, and plant in numbers.   Let us remember on Arbor Day what in fact an arbor is: It is a stand of TREES, an canopy retreat beneath.  For Arbor Day, then, plant an actual arbor.  Nothing exotic.  Something that belongs there, a slice of native forest, a bit of canopy and understory, a stand.