After the morning squirrel hunting trip (got 6), I met with the neighbor that has the new forest garden. He wanted a tour to see the new additions to Toy Ridge Farms. We talked about acorn fattened pork as he has been thinking along those lines. We drive to visit a large parcel of family land. While there, we were walking into a low area when he mentioned that the entirety of their acreage "is good sandy soil."
The words "sandy soil" as of late always prompts mt to think about chestnuts because research into growing chestnuts of all types reveals that clay soils are a short path to the death of a chestnut tree. As we were walking along, he led me through an area where I had to move limbs out of the way to pass. As I moved this one particular limb, the toothiness of the leaf caught me eye. I thought, "Man, that sure looks like an Americsn chestnut.". My eyes followed the limb proximally and the bark of the limb caught my eye next. It looked just like the bark from the chestnuts growing in the test plots we visited at Virginia Tech.
Knowing the human propensity for seeing what we want to see, and since I would love to find the Southernmost specimen of the American chestnut tree still in existence, I began trying to turn the find into something other than a chestnut. However, the more attempts made to rule out a chestnut merely increased my confidence that this was, in fact, truly a pure American chestnut.
One of the things that impressed me about the chestnut trees at Virginia Tech was the sheer size of the leaves. They were massive when compared to chinquapin leaves and appreciably larger than Chinese chestnuts. Does this qualify as a massive leaf:
Here is the video made while on scene:
I can't say for sure if this is an American chestnut but I sure do hope it is. I forwarded the above video and picture on to the president of The Alabama chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation. He will also be receiving a leaf/twig sample in the mail in the next few days.
We plan to return to the area tomorrow to see if there are any other specimens that we might find. I would have loved to have looked around for the rest of the day but I had left the kids home alone as we had only planned to be gone for a very few minutes.