But evidently it was worth it. A single, particularly valued seed could fetch up to five
guineas. On one trip, John Lyon cleared £900 after expenses, a considerable fortune, then
returned the next year and made nearly as much again. Fraser made one long trip under
the sponsorship of Catherine the Great of Russia and emerged from the wilderness only to
find that there was a new czar who had no interest in plants, thought he was mad, and
refused to honor his contract. So Fraser took everything to Chelsea, where he had a little
nursery, and made a good living selling azaleas, rhododendrons, and magnolias to the
English gentry.
Others did it for the simple joy of finding something new-- none more admirably than
Thomas Nuttall, a bright but unschooled journeyman printer from Liverpool who came to
America in 1808 and discovered an unexpected passion for plants. He undertook two long
expeditions, which he paid for out of his own pocket, made many important discoveries,
and generously gave to the Liverpool Botanic Gardens plants that might have made him
rich. In just nine years, from a base of zero, he became the leading authority on American
plants. In 1817, he produced (literally, for he not only wrote the text but set most of the
type himself) the seminal Genera of North American Plants, which stood for the better
part of a century as the principal encyclopedia of American botany. Four years later he
was named curator of the Botanic Garden at Harvard University, a position he held with
distinction for a dozen years, and somehow also found time to become a leading authority
on birds, producing a celebrated text on American ornithology in 1832. He was, by all
accounts, a kindly man who gained the esteem of everyone who met him. Stories don't
get a great deal better than that.
Already in Nuttall's day the woods were being transformed. The panthers, elk, and
timberwolves were being driven to extinction, the beaver and bear nearly so. The great
first-growth white pines of the north woods, some of them 220 feet high (that's the height
of a twenty-story building), had mostly been felled to make ships' masts or simply cleared
away for farmland, and nearly all the rest would go before the century was out.
Everywhere, there was a kind of recklessness borne of a sense that the American woods
was effectively inexhaustible. Two-hundred-year-old pecan trees were commonly chopped
down just to make it easier to harvest the nuts on their topmost branches. With each
passing year the character of the woods changed perceptibly. But until quite recent times-
- painfully recent times--one thing remained in abundance that preserved the primeval
super-Eden feel of the original forest: the massively graceful American chestnut.
There has never been a tree like it. Rising a hundred feet from the forest floor, its
soaring boughs spread out in a canopy of incomparable lushness, an acre of leaves per
tree, a million or so in all. Though only half the height of the tallest eastern pines, the
chestnut had a weight and mass and symmetry that put it in another league. At ground
level, a full-sized tree would be ten feet through its bole, more than twenty feet around. I
have seen a photograph, taken at the start of this century, of people picnicking in a grove
of chestnuts not far from where Katz and I now hiked, in an area known as the Jefferson
National Forest. It is a happy Sunday party, all the picnickers in heavy clothes, the ladies
with clasped parasols, the men with bowler hats and walrus moustaches, all handsomely
arrayed on a blanket in a clearing, against a backdrop of steeply slanting shafts of light
and trees of unbelievable grandeur. The people are so tiny, so preposterously out of scale
to the trees around them, as to make you wonder for a moment if the picture has been