Conscious Choice: Chestnuts' Last Chance

May 1996

Chestnuts' Last Chance

by Dan Sutherland

Grand Haven, Michigan seems to be the quintessential midwestern town. It’s on Lake Michigan, with an older, boutique-oriented downtown. It has an expansive strand, which hosts national volleyball tournaments all summer. It boasts a healthy, albeit auto-dependent economy. And thanks to the dubious work of the zebra mussel, it boasts a clear, clean-looking shoreline.

It also has just a touch of midwestern bizarre: the downtown waterfront has a special attraction known as "the world’s largest musical." It is, in reality, a musical fountain with hundreds of water jets pumping out water against a backdrop of multi-colored lights and muzak. It plays on summer nights to packed crowds.

Despite its northern location, Grand Haven is growing fast and far. As part of the process, land that has been cultivated for more than 150 years has been plotted now, and chained in reserved for housing tracts. This, too, is in keeping with the landscape of success in the midwest.

A few miles south and east of "The world’s largest musical," there is a family farm. The George Unger farm, as it is still known, had belonged to the same family for most of the century. Before that, the ground had been broken by pioneers. Since Mr. Unger died, the place has lain vacant. Vines grow across the front of the house; the outbuildings are silent. There are a few perennials near the charred remains of the old hay barn. Rhubarb grows with its seed tower; globes of lilacs sprawl; there a few gnarled apple trees, some black walnuts with olive verdi gris on their trunks, and a group of massive white pine.

Then there is another kind of tree. It’s a hardwood. Its bark is thick and gnarled into dark brown plates, and its shade is so dense that even its young grow slowly. The boughs are thick and branch off close to the base of the trunk. Though the trees stand in planted rows, there is a sense of great age about this grove. Their girth — about four feet around — places their age at a time when the world was still titled to the Pottawatomie people.

So true are these American chestnuts in the eldritch beauty that these trees look like ideal set models for The Hobbit or The Nibelungen Cycle. Indeed, the trees would be apt for a set of Gotterdammerung: The Twilight of the Gods because they’re living in their own half-life. They survive, mysteriously, the blight that has killed four billion of their kin. And they grow now at the discretion of a local developer.

At one time, American chestnuts stretched from the Maritime Provinces to the Mississippi Valley. Before a fungoid blight wiped them out, the tasty, filbert-like nuts had accompanied the three sisters — beans, corn, squash — in nourishing both animals and humans. Their fine-grained wood was prized for panels and cabinets much as black walnut is today. One of the trees was cut down by the local power company, which said that it grew too close to the tension lines that were strung 100 yards away. But the cutting at least provided an opportunity to consult the growth ring record: the tree had been planted in the 1820s.

George Unger’s last wish was that the grove should remain intact and uncut. The man who administered Unger’s estate respected that wish, and the trees went on to become a source of the advertised blight-resistant Chestnut hybrids, such as the Dunstan, the Williamette, and the Revival. Over time, the grove has come to bear classic signs of the bug. But the trees are recovering, and the younger seedlings and saplings are thriving.

Now the estate administrator has sold the grove; the five-acre stand of trees is only a small part of a hundred-acre, 169-lot subdivision. there is wetland on the parcel, too, and the developer — a Mr. Stanley Boelkins, former township trustee — says he must plot an access road directly through the grove of chestnuts. Mr. Boelkins says the person who made a promise to George Unger is no longer with the company. He adds, "those trees are so old and diseased, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to die anyway."

And so are we all, Mr. Boelkins.

The development hasn’t begun its work yet. There are some survey markers; there’s been some coverage in the local papers. But for now, the grove is still attached to the living — though not as firmly as when it belonged to a farm. The trees still live their tranquil life; their prickly burs have dropped bushels of nuts. Squirrels and chipmunks keep adding to the pyramids of shell bits around the trees, as they have done for more than a century and a half.

Close by the giant trees, healthy young saplings are crowding out the upstart Scotch pines, planted in the‘30s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Slowly, by a few feet each year, the farm fields are returning to a state of graced chaos. With a little thought and patience on the part of its present "owner," this five-acre stand of Castenaea Dentata can teach us a few things about blight and survival, and the American chestnut could crown our yards and meadows.

It’s not a likely event, of course. But the chestnuts have pulled through before.

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