The Best News So Far This Year (For Me)

Yes, I know, it's only January 2, and yes, I know that the article is from 6 months ago, but the fact that there large stands of mature American Chestnut trees producing offspring in multiple locations on the Eastern Searboard is news to me.

There has always been a scattered American Chestnut trees out there, but they were too far away from each other to pollinate, which meant that there was no future.

There are now (small) chestnut forests that one can hike through.

Hundreds of years ago, American chestnut trees dominated the Appalachian Mountain forest-scape. They stood an imposing 100 feet tall and eight feet wide at maturity, lived for up to 600 years, and covered an estimated 200 million acres of land from Mississippi to Maine. Carpenters prized their lumber. Farmers regaled their ability to produce cheap and nutritious feed for livestock. Gourmands crowned their nuts the world’s finest.

Then an invasive blight from East Asia arrived around 1904. The fungus attacked tree trunks and felled the giants by the tens of thousands. While lone trees survived here and there, their nuts were infertile without others to cross-pollinate them, and by 1950 American chestnuts became functionally extinct.

“The devastation represents one of the greatest recorded changes in natural plant population caused by an introduced organism in history,” says West Virginia University emeritus professor of plant pathology and former American Chestnut Foundation president William MacDonald. Had the tragedy been avoided, hikers on the iconic Appalachian Trail would not only experience a “radically different landscape” but enjoy “some very tasty treats around their fall campfires,” he says.

The ACF has spent the past seventy-five years working with various conservation agencies to crossbreed blight-resistent American chestnut trees using clippings from anomalous survivors and Chinese or Japanese varieties. 

The Asian trees “introduce a degree of immunity into the genome and produce a first-generation hybrid,” says John Scrivani, a forester and former president of the ACF Virginia chapter. The new trees are then back-bred with American progenitors across multiple generations until they produce blight-resistent offspring that are genetically indecipherable from those once found in the wild.        

A Meadowview, Virginia, research center spearheads the effort, and more than a dozen experimental, large-plot plantings on state public lands have not only survived but reached maturity. Lesesne State Forest in Nelson County, for instance, holds about thirty acres of natural, second-growth woods anchored by seventy-foot-tall American chestnut trees that are more than sixty years old—and produce delicious wild nuts that few living people beyond foresters and researchers have ever tasted.

………

Large stands of publicly accessible American chestnut forests are now found in more than a dozen locations spread across the Virginia mountains. Other smaller experimental plots exist in Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maine, but the largest and oldest sit within ten miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway at Lesesne and Matthews State Forest in Galax. Sky Meadows State Park in Delaplane and the Mountain Lake Wilderness near Blacksburg also hold destination-worthy groves.  

For the first time in my life, I want to go on a hiking trip.

If This Is True, I Am So Stoked

This is Silphium!


Is this Silphium?

And by so stoked, I mean even more stoked than finding that Hugh Jackman will reprise Wolverine in the next Deadpool.

Some researchers believe that they have rediscovered Silphium in Turkey, the fabulously expensive spice and medicinal herb beloved by the ancient Romans.

I have cooked using a similar, though historically less prestigious spice, Asafoetida (also called Parthian Laser in Apicius, while Silphium is also called Laser) in recreations of historical recipes, so if this is true, I want to get my hands on the resin:

A “miracle” plant consumed by Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, which was thought to have become extinct two thousand years ago, has now been rediscovered in Turkey by a professor, who thinks he’s found a botanical survivor.

The plant, which the Ancient Greeks called silphion (silphium), was a golden-flowered plant. It was once the most sought-after product in the Mediterranean even before the rise of Athens and the Roman Empire.

It is believed that the plant with yellow flowers attached to a thick stalk was crushed, roasted, sauteed, and boiled for medicinal purposes, food, and even contraception. [It should be noted that evidence of its use as a contraceptive is a bit sketchy, but it definitely was used as an aphrodisiac] During the reign of Julius Caesar, more than a thousand pounds of the plant were stockpiled alongside gold in Rome’s imperial treasures, and silphion saplings were valued at the same price as silver.

However, just seven centuries after the adored plant was first documented growing along the coast of Cyrenaica in what is now modern day Libya, silphion disappeared from the ancient Mediterranean world.

Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder in his Natural History claims that “just one stalk has been found” of the plant in the first century A.D., “and it has been given to Emperor Nero.” This was the last documented account of the silphion.

………

Despite the plant having been perceived to be extinct for centuries and having completely disappeared from the history books, a researcher at Istanbul University, Mahmut Miski, suspects he has re-discovered the ancient plant. He believes the Ferula Drudeana that grows on Mount Hasan is the elusive ancient plant—nearly a thousand miles from where it once grew.

According to a report by National Geographic, the researcher found it has similarities with the silphion plant which line up with old botanical texts and images of the plant on Ancient Greek coins.

I make a hobby of redacting historical recipes, and this is like the holy grail of ancient spices.