Empire A8
BRIEF:
A numbered selection from Greg Miller's Empire Chestnut breeding program in Ohio — the program behind Gideon, Peach and Amy. Still under evaluation here.
DETAILED:
Empire A8 comes from Greg Miller's Empire Chestnut Company in Carrollton, Ohio — the breeding program responsible for Gideon, Peach, Amy and a good share of the best Chinese chestnut material now growing in the eastern United States.
The prefix tells us where it came from but not which mother tree it represents. A8 is a working code, and unlike Gideon or Peach it has never been named, described or written up. That is not unusual. Miller's program runs on the idea that existing nursery stock has not yet captured what the species is capable of, and that the way forward is to plant the offspring of the best available parents in orchards across the country, so that each new planting doubles as a progeny test. Twenty-nine growers in fifteen states are now running more than twelve thousand of those trees.
Ours are part of that. What A8 turns out to be is something we will report as the trees come into bearing.