Blandy Cowl Week 2/4

Today is our second installment of the Blandy Farm knit-along project. This week we're talking about butternut trees. If you'd like to catch up on Blandy Farm and the intro to this miniseries, check out my first post here.

Photo courtesy of Blandy Farm

The scientist in the spotlight this week is graduate student Mia Murray. You can watch her chat to the knit-along crowd in this video, or read more about her work in this UVA Today article. She is working with research professor T'ai Roulston at Blandy Farm and across Virginia to identify, assess, and preserve butternut trees.

 

The Tree

Butternut trees are a close relative to black walnuts -- those ornery trees that pelt you with rock-hard tennis balls should you happen to pass under them on a breezy day in fall. Luckily for our noggins, butternut trees are typically a bit shorter than black walnuts, and their fruits are a good bit smaller, making them much less likely to cause a concussion. (If you don't live near a black walnut and this humor is lost on you, I apologize.)

Butternut trees are native to northeastern North America, from Ontario southward to the Mid-Atlantic states of the US. Each tree has a lifespan of 80 to 100 years. While they were never as prevalent as oaks or chestnuts, they have a long history of use by Native populations as well as Vikings who visited the Americas centuries ago. 

Today, the butternut population is in sharp decline due to Butternut Canker Disease.

  

The Disease

Butternut Canker Disease was first identified in the 1960s and has since obliterated between 70% and 90% of all established butternut trees. A fungal pathogen of unknown origin, Butternut Canker Disease is transmitted by rainfall and insects -- two things that are notoriously difficult to mitigate.

Infected trees develop a black blemish that starts on the outer layer of the trunk and expands outward. The disease causes the tree's bark to peel off, exposing the inner wood and preventing water and nutrients from reaching the full canopy. While some trees are able to create scars and survive with a canker infection, most are killed by the disease itself, or by being weakened to a point that they can no longer resist environmental stressors like wind or flooding.

Some butternuts have developed resistance to Butternut Canker Disease by hybridizing with Japanese walnut trees, but the hybrids are more susceptible to a range of other diseases.  

Photo courtesy of Blandy Farm

 

The Project

After Butternut Canker Disease was identified, researchers in the 1980s began to index the butternut tree population across its range... excluding Virginia. Mia Murray, T'ai Roulston, and volunteers across the state are working to fill this gap in census data by identifying butternut trees in Virginia and assessing them for resistance to Butternut Canker Disease.

Since beginning the project, some 300 butternuts have been logged in Virginia. As they drop fruit in the coming weeks, researchers plan to collect the nuts and propagate them at Blandy Farm to help rebuild the population. 

 

Get Involved

If you're in Virginia and happen to stumble across a butternut tree, you can contribute to ongoing research by sending a photo and location information to uvabutternuts@virginia.edu.

Cowl Progress

Now for the knitty details. As I am only on row 25 of the chart, my cowl currently has no butternut. However, I am pleased to report that the motifs are finally starting to look like something.

The leaves sprouting from the beginning of the round are from a black tupelo tree, which I believe we'll learn more about next week. On the other side, I'm almost done with the woodcock motif. I somehow messed up my stitch count on his little bird body, so I had to fudge his feathers a bit. I won't tell if you won't.

 

Speaking of woodcocks, Brad Garrett once starred in a mediocre sitcom called "Til Death," and his next door neighbors were the Woodcocks. Alas, none of the jokes had anything to do with birds. 

If you'd like to learn more about the American Woodcock without stumbling across some questionable Google results, I suggest scrolling through Cornell's online bird guide.