There were once almost 4 billion American chestnuts and they were among the largest, tallest, and fastestgrowing trees in the eastern forest. The wood was longlasting, straightgrained, and suitable for furniture, fencing, and building. The nuts fed billions of birds and animals. It was almost a perfect tree that is, until it was killed by a blight a century ago. That blight has been called the greatest ecological disaster to strike the world's forests in all of history. A tree that had survived all adversaries for 40 million years had disappeared within 40.