Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
For decades, a stand of trees in western Wisconsin was untouched by a lethal fungus that wiped out the American chestnut over much of the eastern United States. Isolated from its natural range, the 90-acre forest near West Salem in La Crosse County – purely by a freak of geography – became the largest stand of the trees in the United States to escape chestnut blight. Then, bad news. In 1987, the blight was identified in the private woods on Highway C north of town. Big chestnuts, nearly 100 feet tall, began dying. They were succumbing to the invasive fungus Cryphonectria parasitica, which was from Asia and was first discovered at the Bronx Zoo in 1904. But the latest research shows that the chestnuts are beginning to respond. In some cases, trees that were given up for dead are growing like gangbusters. “The results are mixed, but we are encouraged by it,” said William MacDonald, a leading expert on chestnut blight at West Virginia University. “If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said things aren’t going as we thought they would. But now we see positive aspects to this stand.”
