This past week all of us interns spent Thursday morning helping Jim Walizer plant about a hundred chestnut trees in an open field not too far away from the museum site.  Jim was telling us about how chestnut trees used to be one of the most dominate trees in Pennsylvania forests a hundred years ago, but now there are not too many left due to a blight that destroys the American Chestnut.

Jim has been working for decades on cross breeding an American Chestnut with a Chinese Chestnut that is blight resistant in hopes that this type of chestnut tree will grow tall and be resistant to the blight.  The trees we planted were Jim’s trees that he grew on his farm.  He told us that he has given away thousands of his trees away to others.  He is very passionate about his work and is investing into the next generation in hopes that in thirty years from now his trees that he planted will be studied and examined to see how well they did.  All of us interns were talking about how cool it will be that in a few decades we can come back to this field to see its growth and say that we had a part in planting each tree!