by Cameron Smith

Mike Nemeroski has a farmer's hands - thick fingers, broad palms, strong from a lifetime of work.

He's using those hands to bring the American chestnut back from the brink of extinction - even though he'll be long dead before the results of his efforts will be known.

At his farmhouse near Port Dover, he shows me a chestnut board taken from an old barn and sanded to remove the weathered outer layer.  His gestures speak more eloquently than his words about how much he cares.

His hand gently traces the dramatic dark grain, the colour of milk chocolate, as it swirls through the lighter wood.  He picks up a bowl a friend has made and his hands caress it.  He shows picture frames that he made and his fingers linger.

His touch is the touch of a lover.  It needs no words of explanation.

"This is a tree that looked after the pioneers from the cradle to the grave," he says.  "They made everything from it: furniture, tongues for machinery, barns, harrows, tobacco kilns, door casings, banisters.  Fence posts would last 50 years, because it's so rot-resistant.

"It has been completely devastated by fungal disease, but we think it can be brought back."

The "we" are the Canadian Chestnut Council and the Norfolk Chestnut Working Group, which concentrate on what was once prime chestnut country in the sand plains of the Haldimand-Norfolk are running west from Port Dover.

American chestnuts once made up a quarter of the forest that stretched from Michigan to Maine and south to Georgia.  They were tall and straight, easily achieving diameters of more than a metre in Ontario.  Nemeroski has a 1912 photograph taken near St. Williams, about 50 kilometres west of Port Dover, of a chestnut nearly two metres in diameter.

The fungus arrived in New York City from Asia in 1904.  By the early 1920s, it had reached southern Ontario.  By 1950, the tree was all but wiped out.

The fungus causes cankers on the trunk that prevent the soil's moisture and nutrients from rising up the trunk to nourish the tree.  After the cankers girdle the tree, it dies.

Stupms will produce sprouts, but they, too, get infected and die, until the roots simply give up.

Nemeroski says several methods are being tried to combat the fungus.  The most promising is to crossbreed the American with the Chinese chestnut, which is highly resistant to the fungus. 

By continuing to crossbreed through seven generations - first, only against pure American chestnuts and, finally, against same-generation hybrids - Nemeroski and his colleagues expect to produce an almost pure American chestnut that retains the fungus-resistant gene from the Chinese chestnut.

Since a chestnut has to grow five to seven years before it can be crossed, the process will take 35 to 49 years.  Nemeroski is 69.

The breeding program is well underway, thanks to a grant from the Trillium Foundation.  It needs a yearly supply of seeds and pollen - and that means someone has to gather them from the tops of the few chestnut sprouts in the county.

That someone, more often than not, is Nemeroski.

He clambers into a bucket at the end of a six-metre exntension he has rigged to the front-end loader on his tractor and has himself hoisted up to do the job.

I marvel at his enthusiasm, to say nothing of his agility.  But, then, I guess love is keeping him young.