Morningside Elementary 5th graders show their sprouts. April 2014
Atlanta, GA January 2020 A slow experiment is unfolding not too far from Morningside Elementary School on Rock Springs Road. We are tantalizingly close to learning the results. And if you, like me, can barely remember what you ate for lunch yesterday, imagine a high school senior remembering a six year old science project from elementary school!
In 2014, patient science teacher Valerie Taylor invited foresters to bring advanced hybrid American chestnut seeds to her second floor classroom. These scientists told fifth graders the tragedy of the Asian chestnut blight that felled as many as 4 billion American chestnut trees.
If these advanced hybrids grew, they promised, the students could be part of a national experiment to restore the beloved tree... and maybe even roast chestnuts from these very seeds before they finished high school. How's that for a Big If?
That fall, students and Boy Scouts from Haygood United Methodist Church transplanted seedlings into the banks of the South Fork of Peachtree Creek. When some of the scouts hunted them two years later, half the trees were missing, lost under a tangle of choking vines. But more than a dozen were growing.
A national author included the Morningside Elementary experiment in her new book Champion: The Comeback Tale of the American Chestnut Tree by Sally M. Walker.
Mark Stoakes and John French with The American Chestnut Foundation share pleasure in the growth. Sept. 26, 2019
Now? Fall 2019, five years after the Morningside seedlings found a home on the South Fork, the foresters returned. In the years since that first experiment hundreds of volunteers restored other native plants and trees to fragile creek bank. Searching beside poplars, beech and redbuds, the scientists spotted one tall chestnut. Thriving, towering over them they seized the slender trunk and shook it with obvious delight.
On a higher bank, they found five more growing tall. The scientists pinched the branches, measured their growth and predicted some are likely to flower in the spring of 2020. That success helped foresters agree to plant more native chestnut hybrids upstream closer to Morningside Elementary School in Herbert Taylor Park, off Johnson Road at Noble Drive. A new group of Friends of Herbert Taylor Park is finding room and volunteers to restore native trees this fall on the banks of the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.
So what about that six year old promise in the Morningside Elementary School classroom? If these trees flower in the spring of 2020, they could produce chestnuts in the fall 2020. Just as those fifth graders are high school seniors. If so, it will be a promise kept. Will many of those fifth graders come back as seniors to see the results of an experiment they may have forgotten they began? Now that's an entirely different experiment in memory.