American chestnut celebrates 250 years

Visiting an American-chestnut tree can still be a celebration even though it’s not what it would have been 125 years ago. After reading the American Chestnut Foundation’s book “Mighty Giants: An American Anthology” one could daydream what it might have been like in 1901. That was just prior to chestnut blight starting, sending its hyphae into the giant tree’s bark and edging toward the vascular cambium – that eternal flame that gives all trees a new annual cylinder of wood and phloem tissue.