Bart Chezar works to revive a species once the most prolific east of the Mississippi
I didn’t get to see the famous painted bunting on a visit to Prospect Park last week. But I observed something that will hopefully be around a lot longer.
I watched Bart Chezar, a volunteer with the Prospect Park Alliance, plant an American chestnut tree.
That may not sound like a big deal. And to be honest, the specimen, only a couple of feet high, looked pretty forlorn, especially in a drizzle.
But until the early 1900s, when a blight caused by an Asian bark fungus destroyed them, the American chestnut was the most prolific species east of the Mississippi, an estimated 25% of the hardwood forest population. “Prior to the blight, they were more common than oaks,” Mr. Chezar said.
My knowledge of the American chestnut tree, or any chestnut tree for that matter, was approximately zero. It was limited to their nuts roasting over an open fire.
ENLARGE“They used to come from here,” explained Mr. Chezar, a former research-and-development engineer with the New York Power Authority who has devoted his retirement to the restoration of native species. He meant the nuts. “Now they come from Europe and Asia.”
The Alliance, whose mission over more than a quarter century has included restoring the park’s woodlands, began planting chestnut seedlings in 2004.
My understanding is that the trees grew quite well for about eight years. “We started to see them flower,” Mr. Chezar reported.
But then the trees began to show signs of that Model T-era blight. So the Alliance teamed up with the American Chestnut Foundation, which supplied them with a new blight-resistant species of chestnut.
Mr. Chezar, with the assistance of Alliance arborists, began planting the new, hybridized seedlings alongside the native-American chestnuts.
It was one of those hardy souls that I watched him dig a hole for. He had the help of Ryan Gellis, an Alliance arborist. They were on the side of a hill behind Prospect Park’s Litchfield Villa.
The 69-year-old retiree—before chestnuts Mr. Chezar, a Brooklyn native, was the first person granted a license to restore oysters to New York Harbor, and he’s also been involved in bringing osprey back to the area—pointed out a nearby specimen.
He’d planted it several years ago and it appeared to be flourishing. At least to the extent that any tree can be said to be flourishing this dormant time of year.
Its leaves were brown and dry, but abundant. And I was reminded of the discreet pleasure that accrues to those who manage to make things grow.
The hill apparently gets good morning light, though the team planted the new specimen under a branch that could block the sun come spring. “What I might do is cut this branch down,” Mr. Chezar said. Whether seriously or in jest I couldn’t quite tell.
“I’d prefer you didn’t,” deadpanned John Jordan, the Alliance’s director of landscape management.
We made our way further down a path overlooking the park’s Long Meadow, where Mr. Chezar pointed out some of the first chestnuts he planted in the park. They already looked like mature trees, though you could see the distressing signs of blight on several of them, evident through a depression in the bark.
“Bart gave them all names,” somebody said.
“Only one of them,” Mr. Chezar demurred.
He named it “Gumby,” explaining how it earned that moniker.
“During Hurricane Irene a big oak tree fell and wiped out all the trees in here.”
Including Gumby, though Mr. Chezar and his associates managed to right it.
“A month later there’s a snowstorm,” he remembered, “and the tree got bent in the other direction.”
While quiet satisfaction is one of the byproducts of gardening and woodland restoration, heartbreak is the other. You can put time and effort and, yes, love, into a tree or plant, only to have nature—in the form of ice, or snow, or wind, or wildlife—come along and knock you back to zero. There is little to do but marvel at its indifference.
But Mr. Chezar appeared unbowed as we bushwhacked into the wood, even as he predicted that beloved Gumby, still healthy, would succumb to blight eventually.
“What we want to do is grow some of the blight-resistant ones to the point where they will cross with some of the mature ones,” he explained.
It is too soon to know if they’ll succeed. But if anybody seems able to nurse a tree to health, it is Bart Chezar.