BRONX, New York (WABC) — Twenty hybrid American chestnut trees were planted at the Bronx Zoo on Monday as part of an effort to bring the once-prevalent tree back to New York City.
The Wildlife Conservation Society joined the 1,000 Chestnut Challenge, an initiative started by the New York Restoration Project.
“We planted 17 in this area of the zoo today, then another three over by the tiger exhibit,” one person said during the planting.
The project carries particular significance at the Bronx Zoo because chestnut blight was first identified there, according to those involved in the effort.
“When we started to research the chestnut, we learned that the blight had been discovered here,” said Jason Smith of the New York Restoration Project. “It was Chinese and European chestnuts had been introduced in many places by Europeans when they arrived. And but fairly quickly after it spread throughout the region, and over 4 billion trees were lost within 30 years. So was a huge ecological catastrophic.”
An annual report from 1906 said it was “safe to predict” that “the American Chestnut tree” would be gone in two years.
Craig Piper of the Wildlife Conservation Society said returning the trees to the zoo brings the effort full circle.
“And it was just so for us, it’s so exciting to have history come full circle and return chestnut trees to the Bronx Zoo, where that disease was first identified,” Piper said. “And so there have been a number of organizations that have been working to try to come up with a blight resistant chestnut. So there are some researchers have worked for decades on this.”
The American Chestnut Foundation is developing the hybrid tree and donating seeds for the effort.
The New York Restoration Project works across the city’s five boroughs to increase access to green space.
“We are a greening organization, so we work in all five boroughs. Our mission is to bring well-managed green space to all New Yorkers,” Smith said. “We decided to launch a really ambitious chestnut planting project.”
Smith said there was considerable interest after the organization promoted the project on social media.
“We put something on social media and once at the beginning and we had a list of like 2,000 people that were like, give me a chestnut,” Smith said. “We actually temporarily had to close down our farm because we were getting too much interest.”
The hybrid American chestnut trees planted at the Bronx Zoo can grow as much as 10 feet wide when mature. The New York Restoration Project plans to begin distributing free seedlings in the spring.
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