At the Kingman Research Farm just outside of the University of New Hampshire campus, there’s an orchard of chestnut trees, growing under the watchful eyes of researchers. The American chestnut was a ...

In the panoply of smells that mark the transition of fall into winter, few are more evocative than chestnuts roasting on an open fire. The aroma that inspired the first line of Mel Torme’s “The ...

A century ago, the forests of the Eastern U.S. looked very different. They were packed with towering chestnut trees. But since then, those trees have largely disappeared, and the forests have evolved ...

Scientists like to say that their work usually proceeds two steps forward and one step back. But sometimes that’s optimistic. Case in point: A scientific effort I’ve been writing about since 2010, the ...