Following on from Luigi’s post a month or so back about the probable return of the chestnut to American woods, two stories, on consecutive days, from the Christian Science Monitor. One gives more information about the complex breeding programme that involves Chinese chestnuts, resistant American trees and lots of painstaking crosses to produce blight-resistant chestnuts. That work has been going on since the early 1980s, and may now be close to complete. A few days earlier, the paper reported on the threat to the Eastern Hemlock, a woolly bug, originally from East Asia. Adelges tsugae has been slowly spreading across the US, where the only hope seems to be a decent cold winter. The fear is that the Eastern Hemlock will go the same way as the Carolina Hemlock, which once shared the forests with the American chestnut and which, experts fear, could now be eaten out of existence.