Can “The Redwoods of the East” Return?

These magnificent trees were our past. Can they be our future?

A blight-killed American chestnut in Tennessee, 1920. Photo: Great Smoky Mountains National Park

The survivors were crammed into the back of a gray Subaru that pulled up to an illegal parking spot a block down from my home just east of Ground Zero. Their savior, a Lorax-resembling retiree named Bart Chezar, had spirited them across the East River from Park Slope, Brooklyn. As he handed…