HR917
BRIEF:
From Bob Stehli's Hiram orchard in Ohio, where blight and a night colder than twenty-five below took two thirds of 4,424 trees. This is one that came through.
DETAILED:
In 1997 Bob Stehli planted 4,424 chestnut seedlings in Hiram, Ohio, drawn from twenty-five cultivars then considered the best chestnut material in North America. What followed was a hard, unplanned experiment.
Chestnut blight killed roughly a third of them. The first time the temperature dropped below twenty-five degrees under zero, another third were damaged badly enough to be cut out. More came out over the years for poor health, insect damage and storm damage. Last of all, trees were removed simply for failing to produce good nuts. About 350 of the original 4,424 are still standing, and those survivors became the foundation of Wintergreen Tree Farm's breeding program.
Our HR917 appears to be one of them. We say appears because the tag is a working code rather than a name, and we have not confirmed it with Stehli directly. If we have it right, this tree passed a blight screen and a twenty-five-below screen before anyone thought to look at its nuts.
For an orchard in Connecticut, that is a better credential than any nut weight. Stehli's surviving trees carry genetics from at least four chestnut species, so this is a hybrid rather than a pure Chinese chestnut, and we are still learning what it does here.