Rutland students are helping bring back the American chestnut
Students at Mount St. Joseph Academy care for nine chestnut trees, and seeds from the grove have been planted at six other Vermont schools.
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Nine American chestnut trees at Mount St. Joseph Academy are a small orchard with a long job. WCAX reported on October 8, 2026, that students have tended the grove in biology class for the past five years, planting, fertilizing, and spraying to keep deer off. Teacher and local grower Tom Estill told the station the point is to keep the tree's genetics moving, because a blight found at the turn of the last century nearly wiped the species out of woods where it had been common.
Seeds grown at the school have been planted at six other schools in Vermont, and Estill has also put trees in at Rutland High School and elsewhere in the city. It is a handful of trees, not a restored forest.
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