This paper shows that there exist Reed--Solomon (RS) codes, over \black{exponentially} large finite fields \black{in the code length}, that are combinatorially list-decodable well beyond the Johnson radius, in fact almost achieving the list-decoding capacity. In particular, we show that for any $ε\in (0,1]$ there exist RS codes with rate $Ω(\fracε{\log(1/ε)+1})$ that are list-decodable from radius of $1-ε$. We generalize this result to list-recovery, showing that there exist $(1 - ε, \ell, O(\ell/ε))$-list-recoverable RS codes with rate $Ω\left( \fracε{\sqrt{\ell} (\log(1/ε)+1)} \right)$. Along the way we use our techniques to give a new proof of a result of Blackburn on optimal linear perfect hash matrices, and strengthen it to obtain a construction of strongly perfect hash matrices. To derive the results in this paper we show a surprising connection of the above problems to graph theory, and in particular to the tree packing theorem of Nash-Williams and Tutte. We also state a new conjecture that generalizes the tree-packing theorem to hypergraphs, and show that if this conjecture holds, then there would exist RS codes that are \em optimally \em (non-asymptotically) list-decodable.