All over eastern North America right now, chestnut breeders are pollinating tree flowers. "So here is actually some flowers," Retired forester John Scrivani explains. They’re beautiful.

The chestnut blight is a fungus accidentally brought to North America on imported Asiatic trees in the late 1800s, and it’s devastated our wild American species, rendering it functionally extinct.

So the tree has created callous tissue, which is compartmentalizing out the blight." He further explained, "So the blight actually grows only in the bark, and it produces oxalic acid.

For forty years the American Chestnut Foundation has funded research into producing chestnut trees that have been genetically modified to resist the blight.

American Chestnut Foundation of Virginia board member Carl Absher asked Harding Avenue Elementary students to hold hands to form the circumference of an early chestnut tree.

An American chestnut tree growing next to a steep mountain trail in Nelson County inspires hope as magnificently as a brilliant sunrise on a new day.

A few weeks ago a reader suggested I write about beech leaf disease, but I said it wasn’t that big a deal. Then I went for a ...

I don’t know what a mature American chestnut looks like and my granddaughter won’t know what a mature beech tree looks like. Such is the circle of life, I guess.

This isolates the female flowers on breeding trees from the huge sea of male pollen that’s all over the area once the catkins release. This way, breeders like John can control the crosses they’re ...

The long-term, temperature-controlled storage of ash seeds is similar to the effort used to reintroduce the American chestnut tree to the hardwood tree mix, Bachman said.

Just 75 miles outside of the Washington, DC metro area, Shenandoah National Park offers a forested escape. Running for 105 miles along the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is a long, skinny park with mountain ...