Breed the survivors.
Grow the future.
Grayson LandCare and the Virginia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation have partnered together to bring neighbors, families, students, foresters, and chestnut enthusiasts into the science of restoring the American chestnut—one tree, one cross, and one season at a time
A restoration project you can touch.
Our goal is to breed large surviving American chestnuts while building a welcoming, year-round community around the work.
Some American chestnuts survive long enough to reach the canopy, flower, and endure repeated blight infections. Those trees may carry useful combinations of native resistance genes. We find them, bring their genetics into accessible orchards, cross the best trees, grow their offspring, and help TACF evaluate which families deserve the next round of breeding.
This is serious science—but it is also a reason to hike, learn, plant, graft, collect pollen, harvest nuts, and celebrate together.
A full year of chestnut work.
Every season offers a different way to participate, whether you prefer the orchard, the woods, the nursery, or the data table.
Winter
Return to promising trees, collect dormant scions, and prepare for grafting.
Spring
Graft seedlings and resprouts, plant trials, and care for the Matthews orchard.
Summer
Collect pollen, make controlled crosses, use drones, and hike to flowering trees.
Fall
Harvest burs, process nuts, plant bare-root seedlings, and celebrate the year.
Many projects. One breeding cycle.
Each project feeds the same long-term goal: a diverse population of American chestnuts with stronger inherited blight resistance.
Pollen & RGS
Make controlled crosses and use genomic tools to select the strongest offspring.
Find wild survivors
Use drone imagery and field searches to locate flowering trees in the mountains.
Grafting
Bring remote genetics together where breeding becomes faster and practical.
Plantings
Build the replicated tests that reveal how families perform across sites.
Experimental screening
Raise families and explore tissue response to oxalic acid as one possible signal.
Fall harvest
Collect, label, and safeguard the nuts produced by the season's breeding work.
“The science gets stronger when more people can take part in it.”— The idea behind the Grayson Chestnut Project
Everyone can contribute.
Some volunteers climb and collect. Some graft. Some plant. Some measure. Some bring children on a hike and learn to recognize a chestnut leaf. The project is designed so that curiosity—not prior expertise—is the entry requirement.