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Health & Fitness

American Chestnuts in Fairfield: A Long-Lost Species Returns

Free program! Fairfield is poised to be at the center of an ecological comeback story! Find out more from the scientist who life work is restoring the American Chestnut to our Connecticut forests.

The American chestnut tree was once the most important food and timber tree species in the eastern hardwood forest. The population of mature native chestnuts was almost completely wiped out by the Asian bark fungus -- accidentally introduced into the U.S. in the early 1900s.

In 1910, about half of all our hardwood trees in Fairfield were American chestnuts. By the 1940s, over 30 million acres of chestnut trees were decimated -- from Maine to Georgia and west to the Mississippi. This tragedy was one of the largest ecological disasters in American history.

Now there is a dramatic ecological comeback story. Fairfield will be a part of that comeback story.

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On Monday, March 19th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Memorial Room of the Fairfield Public Library, the Fairfield Forestry Committee and Fairfield Garden Club will host  

Our featured speaker is Dr. Sandra Anagnostakis, a pioneering scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, who has been fighting chestnut blight for 45 years through research, breeding and planting programs. 

Find out what's happening in Fairfieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Dr. Anagnostakis will talk about the historical importance of the American chestnut in our eastern forests, and the Asian bark fungus that reduced this species to an understory shrub.  She will also discuss Fairfield's part -- through an initiative of the Fairfield Garden Club -- in replanting American chestnuts in 2012.  

Chestnuts, once an important part of all of the forests of Connecticut, can now have their place in Fairfield once again. Seminar is free and open to the public. 

For more information  contact Fairfield Forestry Chair Misty Beyer at mistybeyer@optonline.net or Fairfield Garden Club Coordinator Barbara Wooten at bgwooten@optonline.net     

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