As soon as a typical sight, Missouri’s native chestnut tree, Castanea ozarkensis, offered meals for folks and animals in addition to wooden for furnishings and musical devices. Now, the tree, additionally referred to as the Ozark chinquapin, is unfamiliar to most Missourians.
Within the early 20th century, chestnut blight worn out hundreds of thousands of Castanea ozarkensis. The remaining bushes develop solely to a fraction of their former giant stature and produce few viable seeds.
However there’s hope for this as soon as beloved tree, due to efforts from the Ozark Chinquapin Basis, with help from the Missouri Botanical Backyard, to establish and cross blight-resistant remnant bushes with comparable survivors and plant them within the chinquapin’s historic vary.
What’s the Ozark chinquapin?
Castanea ozarkensis, or the Ozark chinquapin, is a tree native to the Ozark-Ouachita Mountain areas of Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. It can be present in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Japanese, and some others scattered areas within the southeastern US.
Earlier than blight, the tree was as soon as a typical upland forest species, and the drought-tolerant hardwood bushes grew as much as 65 toes tall and a couple of–3 toes in diameter. Now, the bushes now to be 20–30 toes tall. It blooms from Could to June, producing yellowish-white flowers and sprout inexperienced rectangular leaves that flip a shade of yellow within the fall.
The tree produces extremely nutritious, sweet-tasting edible chestnuts.
Chestnuts as a meals supply
Ozark chestnuts are edible uncooked or roasted. They can be utilized in baked items. The chestnuts have been as soon as a meals supply for Native Individuals and early settlers. Indigenous folks used them in steamed corn bread dishes much like tamales that always contained beans and nuts.
Native wildlife, together with squirrels, chipmunks, deer, and birds, loved the candy chestnuts as properly.
Drugs and Music
Ozark folklore archives point out that the Ozark chinquapin had historic medical makes use of, too, together with a tea made out of boiling leaves or nuts to treatment a cough, chilly, or sore throat. The hardy wooden of the chinquapin was used extensively for furnishings and fences attributable to its rot resistance. Wooden was additionally used to create musical devices, together with fiddles and banjoes.
Learn extra about Ozark chinquapins and its musical traditions. >