After a century of doomed sprouts, the American chestnut gets another try

On August 28, the USDA cleared a chestnut tree called Darling 54, engineered with one wheat gene that disarms the acid the blight fungus kills with. It is the first forest tree to pass this review, and the first engineered plant approved to bring back a wild species. An EPA review remains before anyone plants one.

Around 4 billion American chestnuts once stretched from Ontario to Mississippi. Blight arrived around 1904, and within fifty years every mature tree was gone. Except the species never finished dying. The roots held on, and for a century they have kept sending up green shoots that the blight kills young. Sprout, die, sprout, die, a hundred years running.

The Syracuse scientists who set out to change that began in the early 1990s, knowing mature chestnuts might come only after their own funerals. William Powell, who led the work, died before the approval did. The doubts are real: the American Chestnut Foundation, once the project's biggest backer, walked away in December 2023. It says these trees grow slower and still sicken at some sites, and it is betting on conventional breeding instead. Whether this tree can hold its own in a forest is an open question.

Job would have recognized the century of shoots. His stump line is envy. A tree gets another chance; a man dies, and where is he? That is verse 10. By verse 14 he asks straight out: if a man dies, shall he live again?

Job never doubted the tree. It was the man he wondered about.

Christians believe that question was answered on a Sunday morning, and when Paul wrote about it, he reached for a farmer's word:

1 Corinthians 15:20But now Christ has been raised from the dead. He became the first fruits of those who are asleep.

First fruits, the early ripening that tells you how the whole field will go. A hundred years of patient hands just gave a dead tree its hope back. Easter makes the wilder claim: the stump was never the lucky one.