Mighty Giants: An American Chestnut Anthology

Chris Bolgiano, Editor • Glenn Novak, Contributing Editor
Foreword by Bill McKibben

Mighty Giants: An American Chestnut Anthology includes Chestnut scenes from artists such as Winslow Homer, Seneca Ernie Smith, Andrew Wyeth, Charles Burchfield, and a generous selection of seldom-seen photographs of American chestnut throughout its history.

Also with its pages is the real life account of “Chestnuts in my Life” by former President Jimmy Carter; Poems by Wendell Berry and Robert Frost; Chestnut folklore and anecdotes, including reminiscences from southern Appalachia to New England, along with historical newspaper chronicles of the tree before, during, and after the blight.;

• Chestnut reflections by plant geneticist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution.”

• Colorful accounts of railroads and locomotives that logged mammoth chestnut trees in Appalachia, by Les Line, longtime editor of Audubon magazine.

Along with Chestnut recollections and inspirations from Bill Owens, Dolly Parton’s uncle—a Tennessee mountain man, musician, and champion of the tree;
excerpts from NY Times best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Prodigal Summer, about a curmudgeonly chestnut breeder and his cantankerous rural Virginia neighbor.

Mighty Giants: An American Chestnut Anthology tells, in images and words, the story of the once mighty monarch of the eastern forests and the scientists who engaged in the struggle against “one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of forest biology”—perhaps the deadliest plant blight ever encountered. It is the story of the dedicated few who refused who give up like: the fearless plant explorer who tracked down the blight in war-torn China, the plant pathologists and geneticists who labored long and valiantly to understand the blight and find a way to thwart it. Finally, this is story of hope, of small but vital triumphs, as the secrets of the American chestnut and its deadly nemesis are gradually revealed. Assembled by and co-published with The American Chestnut Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the re-establishment of the American chestnut tree to its natural range.

Mighty Giants: An American Chestnut Anthology is a chronicle of an American icon and the struggle to bring it back to its place of honor in our forests and landscape. Four billion trees. And only an isolated few survived.