trilobatracker slipped a mickey in the convo. I recognize that pure American chestnut from the Florence planting. I have a few seedlings from that tree.
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We found one of the 2 chestnuts labeled American at University of Montana in Missoula in November, which doubles as the state arboretum and forestry college. Generally the area has alkaline soil and extreme temperature swings, technically zone 5 but some wicked deep frosts sometimes in fall and spring. So it has fruited, there were burrs on the ground. It’s a beautiful campus, also has hickories and hazels. My first time to see a chestnut. Glad to have the ID information.
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There’s a lot of misinformation and mythology about the American chestnut. For instance, the claim that one in every four trees in the eastern deciduous forest was an American chestnut…
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320564884_Did_American_chestnut_really_dominate_the_eastern_forest
There were already hybrids here in the US when the blight arrived. As I understand, the Americans were not all that tasty,by comparison, and the nuts were mostly quite small, so folks had been importing European, Chinese, and Japanese chestnut genetics for planting and crossbreeding long before the early 1900s when the blight appeared.
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