Murder Mysteries, But For Trees

The Most Important Question · Oct 12, 2026 · 1h 7m · transcript

In 1904, somebody noticed a sick tree at the Bronx Zoo.

Within 50 years, the fungus killing it had wiped out about four billion American Chestnut trees from Maine all the way down to Georgia.

In 2018, Richard Powers wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, which I loved. He set it in the early 20th century and made the American Chestnut tree the main character.

This fabled tree, which most of us had probably never even heard of at that point, was a tree that fed families and wildlife for generations, and yet most of us had never seen one fully grown, and we still might not, unless…