Chestnut Trees In Luxembourg Gardens - Paris

By now, I think I've been pretty clear that this place - Luxembourg Gardens in Paris - has left a pretty significant impression on me garden-wise.  Just yesterday, I posted about the metal walking path edging and before that, the many love letters to this Garden/park include:

• The chairs.  
• These amazing vines/ivy that have been trained between posts and trees.  
• These orangerie tree boxes. 
• The fact that they use cocoa bean shell mulch in their beds.  
• And how I copied the color pallete of one of their beds in our raised planter box.

Today, I'm sharing this photo above that shows off the 'bottom' of the pleached row of Horse Chestnut trees.  Pleaching is training/pruning trees that is kind of a close Cousin to espalier.  More here.

For a wider-view perspective on these Horse Chestnut Trees in Luxembourg Gardens, do a Google Image Search for [Horse Chestnut Trees Luxembourg Gardens].  Go there now and poke around.  Or just look at this image here.  Then come back here.

Ok...back? Beautiful, right?

So, the chestnut tree.  Some things finally connect together in my mind.  Knowing that there are Chestnut trees in Paris and we once went to a small town in Northern Italy that was having a Chestnut festival...I now realize that they're plentiful!

But, we don't have them here.  That's strange, right?  I mean...after all...there's that whole 'Chestnuts roasting on an open fire' song at Christmastime.

Welp, I found this Tedx Talk in Youngstown all about the American Chestnut from Rex Mann a retired forest ranger.


Turns out, there was a mass extinction of the American Chestnut.  And there's a group of folks who are trying to bring them back.  That video is worth the 12:45.

These trees, before they were killed by blight were massive things.  Now?  They're all gone.

We're far outside the natural growing area of the American Chestnut, but that doesn't mean we can't root the tree and movement to bring it back on from here in Zone 5b.

Want to learn more about how some folks are working to bring a blight-resistant American Chestnut back to our forests?  Head over here to the American Chestnut Foundation site and poke around and get involved.