"What are the consequences of imposing human values on the natural world? The blight may seem evil to us, but the from the vantage point of the fungus, that other parasite we await might be considered equally evil.

"Perhaps, Frost is ultimately reminding us, our tendency to view nature in terms of our notions of good and bad, desirable and undesirable, can wreak its own kind of evil. Certainly the American chestnut would never have been pushed to the brink of extinction were it not for human agency. Humans introduced the chestnut blight. The tree's plight is a direct result of our visions of what our gardens, our personal Edens, should contain. It's a lesson to bear in mind as we press forward in efforts to redress the blight and restore our perfect tree." (page 128)

 "Unfortunately, it's easy to overlook the change. Diseases and insects spread slowly. The losses they produce accumulate over time, without any obvious beginning or end. By the time the chestnut forests were gone, there were whole new generations who didn't know anything was missing. 'One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,' Leopold wrote. But in an era when there's talk of a widespread 'nature deficit disorder', how many of us have the expertise to recognize the wounds that are being inflicted? It's easy for someone like me, a city dweller with an untrained eye, to look out over a forest vista – as I did in Patrick County, Virginia – and naïvely be reassured by the rolling waves of green. That took place early in my research for this book, and at the time, I did not yet understand that the scene I was admiring was far from a picture of health. In just one example of the troubles now plaguing the southern Appalachian woods, the oak trees that filled the chestnut's place in the forests are themselves in the midst of a major die-back caused by a complicated disease complex known as oak decline. And as those oaks die, they are being replaced by trees like red maple that have even less value to wildlife. As one forest ecologist told me, 'When you have tree species after tree species disappearing, what worries me is there will still be trees and shrubs and people will think their forests are beautiful. But to those who knew what the forest once looked like, it will look like the ruins of an ancient civilization." (page 224)

From American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel

"Despite the repeated setbacks, Graves's enthusiasm for the project never faltered. Year after year, he filed dispatches from the field reporting on another hybrid 'new to science'. He'd describe each in lovingly rich language that reflected his appreciation for nature's stupendously varied palette. The Essate-Jap was 'reddish to Kaiser brown'. The Kelsey had 'burnt sienna bark' and twigs of 'light mineral grey'. The young Hamden's bark was a tint 'somewhere between buckthorn brown and Dresden brown'.

"'He never had a shadow of a doubt about the fact that he was going to bring back the chestnut,' recalled Richard Jayes . . ."

pages 99-100 of American Chestnut by Susan Freinkel

"But it was in Appalachia, in places like Patrick County, Virginia, where the ties between the chestnut and people were most tightly bound. 'If ever there was a place defined by a tree, it was Appalachia,' says folk historian Charlotte Ross, of Appalachian State University. The American chestnut 'was our icon. We loved that tree.'

"On the steep slopes and in the cool, moist hollows of the southern Appalachian mountains, chestnuts grew so abundantly that they accounted for as many as one in four forest trees, and in some places, even more. Chestnuts were big trees everywhere, but this land gave rise to giants – trees a dozen feet wide and ten times as tall. One Goliath in Francis Cove, North Carolina, measured seventeen feet across. In spring, the trees bloomed long bushy catkins of cream-colored flowers that filled the woods with a pungent perfume and made the forests look, from a distance, 'like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface,' as the naturalist Donal Culross Peattie wrote." (pages 17-18)

"No one needed to buy land to pasture cattle or hogs when the forests supplied such a wealth of forage. Farmers would simply notch their mark in the ears of their livestock and turn the animals loose to roam the woods until they were to be butchered or sold. A pig could grow stout as a barrel on chestnuts, acorns, and hickory nuts. That ample carpet of nuts, sometimes inches thick, allowed drovers to move huge herds of hogs, cattle, and even turkeys across the slopes of the southern mountains to supply food for laborers on the plantations to the Southeast. The wildlife that also feasted on the nuts ensured a steady supply of game for the dinner table. 'There wasn't no kind of game that roamed these mountains that didn't eat the chestnuts,' Georgia native Jake Waldroop recalled.' The chestnuts supported everything.

"Folklorist Ross believes the chestnut not only supported settlement in the Appalachians but invited it. The early Scots-Irish settlers wrote letters home describing the riches the woods offered. 'The chestnut mast is knee-deep,' one man boasted, referring to the heavy accumulation of nuts. 'C'mon over cousin,' another wrote to his family in Ulster, Ireland. 'This is the best poor man's country.' And their countrymen followed. Over time the mountains filled with enclaves of tough, independent-minded people who were used to wrestling a living out of the poorest farmland." (pages 19- 20)

From American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel