Maine chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation volunteer Erin Hart and her daughter prepare to transfer a chestnut seedling from its pot to a happier home in the ground. Photo by Eva Butler

By the end of this summer, the Maine Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation will have planted almost 100 new wild chestnut tree seedlings at 10 locations around Maine.

“My only guarantee is that all of these trees we are planting across the state are eventually going to succumb to the chestnut blight,” Eva Butler, outreach coordinator for Maine chapter, said in a telephone interview.

We spoke just after she’d helped plant 10 seedlings at the newly protected 82-acre Cousins River Fields and Marsh Preserve in Yarmouth. So, if the trees are all going to die, I wondered, what’s the point in planting them? It turns out, it’s all about genetics.

The idea is that some of the trees will survive at least long enough to produce chestnuts, which are the seeds that can be planted to create a new generation of trees. Those trees would be genetically diverse, so scientists hope that at least one will have a magic formula that makes it immune to the chestnut blight. The blight was accidentally introduced to the United States in 1904 along with some imported Japanese chestnut trees. Within 50 years, most of the majestic American chestnut trees were dead. (The Asian trees were resistant to the blight.)

“We need to keep the genome alive, so we do the breeding and planting until we find one that is highly blight tolerant,” Butler said.

She said it will likely take many lines of genes, well into the hundreds, to come together in just the right way to create a blight-immune chestnut, which is why the plantings are continuing.

Maine Coast Heritage Trust project manager Kat O’Connor walks three volunteers from the Maine Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation through the process of planting. Photo by Eva Butler

The Chestnuts-Across-Maine program launched this year.

“The 10 pilot projects are the first intended to give Mainers places to learn how to plant and maintain chestnut trees and build their community’s capacity for future forest restoration,” she said. A second goal of the project is to safeguard the genetics of Maine’s wild trees by keeping them alive and reproducing in multiple locations, a goal the Maine chapter has worked on since it was founded 40 years ago.

“Over the past 25 years, (the Maine chapter) has planted over 65,000 chestnut trees and produced many thousands of nuts and seedlings for others to plant,” Butler said. “This experience has provided much insight into how long a small grove of wild-type chestnut trees like the one in Yarmouth can survive before succumbing to blight. Many survive 15 years without blight infection and produce nuts for seven to 10 of those years.”

It is less common for a tree to survive beyond 20 years, but some have.

Maine is the ideal spot for this chestnut-planting effort, as it has more surviving American chestnuts than any other state. More than a century ago, when chestnuts were the most common tree in the eastern United States, Maine was at the northern end of their range, and chestnut forests were not as dense here. That meant that the blight spread less easily among Maine’s sparser population. In some areas in the South, chestnuts sprout from roots that remain from very old trees, creating shrub-like American chestnuts. But these die from the blight before they can even produce seeds.

“We are not giving up,” Butler said. “There is too much at stake. With this effort we can undo the mistakes of the past, and there are many mistakes to undo.”

After American chestnuts began to die, American elms replaced them as the dominant street trees around the country. But late in the 20th century, they too were killed off, in their case by Dutch elm disease.

Now, the emerald ash borer is threatening ash trees, a huge part of American forests and a significant part of the culture of indigenous people in Maine.

“People have to make a decision that this has to stop,” Butler said. “We can’t continue moving plants will-nilly all across the world. That is the most damaging thing we can do as far as spreading disease goes.”

It’s not just living plants that we have to worry about, though. Dutch elm disease is thought to have arrived on European elm logs, which were imported by furniture makers who wanted to use them to create veneers. The emerald ash borer is suspected to have hitchhiked to the U.S. on shipping crates.

Another reason to buy American when you are buying any plant material, living or dead.

Tom Atwell is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth. He can be contacted at: tomatwell@me.com.