A forester friend found a sizable American chestnut on a survey and collected a fair number of seeds. My back yard should be an ideal environment for one, so we are planning on trying to germinate some this year.
This is fascinating. From a web search, the American Chestnut Foundation has a formal process for submitting a sample.
On their request for samples, and why [0]: "Please let us know if you think you have found an American chestnut by submitting a Tree Locator Form and leaf sample. We are always looking to expand our inventory of chestnut trees across the native range. [...] "TACF is continuing its breeding program to make further gains in disease resistance and forest competitiveness, as well as forest health and restoration in general."
On how to submit a sample [1]: The foundation has developed a procedure where you can submit a twig, leaf, and photos to one of their representatives, to verify if the samples came from an American chestnut tree.
Please tell your friend to report it. If it survived and is still producing seeds, then that has a good chance of having blight resistant genes! There are a lot of people working really hard on bringing the species back, and the benefits could be enormous!
You can always cross your fingers but the destruction was so widespread that it's unlikely that any indigenous immunity existed. If it did we would certainly know by now.
But every surviving chestnut might have resistances to something else, like other diseases, stressors or environmental conditions, and we are going to want to cross breed the resistant plants with every other chestnut we can get our hands on in order to create a robust population. Otherwise you end up planting a bunch of trees that die in the first drought, ice storm, or are only happy in one section of the former range.
