“We called them gray ghosts,” the now 77-year-old retired forester says of the American chestnut tree scattered throughout his former North Carolina home and still towering over the forest floors.

We visit an orchard where researchers are breeding Chestnut trees they hope will one day fight off a fungus that's been killing the iconic American tree for more than a century. And now a checkup of ...

American chestnut trees — which produce nuts inside spikey pods — still grow in the wild, but are considered “functionally extinct” because they do not typically live to maturity due to a fungus ...