In the early 1970s, plant pathologist Gary Griffin of Virginia Polytechnic Institute was hunting in the Blue Ridge Mountains when he stumbled on something far more valuable than the grouse he’d planned to bag. “I walked past an enormous chestnut tree,” he recalls. “It had died, but it still had intact bark.” Another man wouldn’t have given the snag a second glance. But such stately old trees—dead or alive—are essential to Griffin’s plans to rescue the majestic species from a tragic end.
Unless you’re of a certain age, the only chestnuts you know are probably the modest Asian types imported as ornamentals. American chestnuts, by comparison, were giants as large as California’s redwoods. They made up more than a quarter of eastern woodlands, and their stout, straight trunks supplied unusually strong and rot-resistant timber. Then in the early decades of the 20th century, blight wiped out American chestnuts. The disease was discovered on trees at the Bronx Zoo exactly 100 years ago, and it soon spread throughout the chestnut’s natural range, from Maine to Mississippi. More than 3 billion trees died. Some survived as ravaged stumps, sending up shoots that would inevitably be attacked and die back over and over again.
