Under A Spreading Chestnut-tree,

The village smithy stands,

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands,

you may recognise the open of The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807–1882, and whilst there are still blacksmiths alas there are virtually no Chestnut trees for him to be under, which is amazing when it was reported that in America there were estimated to be 4 billion trees spreading in dense canopies from Maine to Mississippi and Florida, the loss of these trees was reported in The Bismarck Daily Tribune in 1920, the paper estimated that the value of the trees was $400,000,000 as recently as a decade before, but what caused the decline of so many trees? It was in fact a fungus, imported from Asia, the blight began in the 1890s the trees are “technically extinct,” according to The American Chestnut Foundation, but there is hope, some scientists are crossing American chestnuts with Chinese chestnut trees, which are resistant to the blight, others are infecting trees with other viruses to kill the blight another approach is to sequence the DNA of the American chestnut and the fungus that causes blight, in part to guarantee that any trees reintroduced into the wild are truly blight resistant, the problem in the wild being that the trees when found seldom reach maturity before dyeing, and if you do find one on one of your walks or travels, have a look here to identify it, amazing that something as small as a fungus can bring down a whole forest.