Finding the Mother Tree

A Book Review by Chris Hubbard, Education Director

Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Overstory, hit bookstores in 2018, with its web of interconnecting tales of people whose lives have been influenced by specific trees. While the book revolves around a cast of nine characters, one central character stands out, that of Patricia Westerford. In creating Westerford’s character, Powers was inspired by the life of Suzanne Simard, a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. Suzanne Simard has recently published her first book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, with the book appearing in bookstores earlier this year. Hailing from western Canada, Simard is from a family that has long made its living cutting trees. Her interest in forests and what mysteries they held peaked following an incident in which her dog fell into an outhouse and had to be dug out, which in turn revealed a tangled web of roots and rhizomes. What she observed as shovels cut through the forest floor intrigued her, and as she entered the field of forestry. Confronted with forestry management practices much different than what she had grown up with, practices that stripped the land of trees and soil, set her on her quest to find out what went wrong and why the forest tends to mend itself when left to its own devices. This drive led her to becoming a pioneer in the field of plant communication and intelligence. Her early career experiences in forestry soon had her examining why young seedlings were not growing as intended, leading her to conduct experiments that are now changing the way we look at how trees interact in forests: that forests are not just trees, but rather complex systems of hubs and networks, with mycorrhiza providing connections for cooperation between individual trees and various tree species, as they trade carbon, various other nutrients, water, and information.

Simard’s book explains, in layman’s terms, her methodology and results of her studies and experiments, and the challenges she has faced in conducting her research and presenting her unorthodox ideas, while weaving in the tale of her life growing up and living in western Canada. She has conducted and published the results of hundreds of experiments in the forest, with some of her experimental plantations now over 30 years old. Simard has found compelling evidence that trees communicate and cooperate with each other through a massive belowground communications network of mycorrhiza. Simard explains, “Forests aren’t just a bunch of trees competing with each other, they’re super-cooperators.” She presents a paradigm shift in how we view forests, and how we, as humans, think about the world around us. As she states, “A forest is much more than what you see…”