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Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 4, 2021
“Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that the world is a web of stories, connecting us to one another. [The book] carries the stories of trees, fungi, soil and bears--and of a human being listening in on the conversation. The interplay of personal narrative, scientific insights and the amazing revelations about the life of the forest make a compelling story.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
In this, her first book, now available in paperback, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.
And Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateMay 4, 2021
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.36 x 9.52 inches
- ISBN-10052565609X
- ISBN-13978-0525656098
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Vivid and inspiring . . . For Simard, personal experience leads to revelation, and scientific revelation leads to personal insight . . . Finding the Mother Tree helps make sense of a forest of mysteries. It might even persuade you that organisms other than ourselves—even fungi—have agency.”—Eugenia Bone, The Wall Street Journal
“Simard creates her own complex network in this memoir, by weaving the story of [her] discoveries with vignettes from her past. The themes of her research—cooperation, the legacies that one generation leaves for the next, the ways in which organisms react to and recover from stress and disease—are also themes in her own life. The network of friends, family and colleagues who support Simard, as a scientist and as a woman, is visible throughout . . . It feels like a privilege to be let into her life.”—Emma Marris, Nature
“Simard’s memoir describes the intersecting webs of her career and private life that brought her to rewrite not only the forestry canon but our understanding of nature itself. She is an intellectual force whose powerful ideas overshadow her name . . . Like Charles Darwin’s findings, Simard’s results are so revolutionary and controversial that they have quickly worked their way into social theory, urban planning, culture and art. Simard’s work knocked 19th-century notions of inevitable competition off their pedestals. If a forest is a commons where the fate of the weakest is tied to that of the strongest, then we have a lot of rethinking to do.”—The Washington Post
"Simard has spent decades with her hands in the soil, designing experiments and piecing together the remarkable mysteries of forest ecology . . . elegantly detailed . . . deeply personal . . . A testament to Simard’s skill as a science communicator. Her research is clearly defined, the steps of her experiments articulated, her astonishing results explained and the implications laid bare: We ignore the complexity of forests at our peril.”—The New York Times
“[Simard] shares the wisdom of a life of listening to the forest . . . a scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series.”—The Observer
“Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that the world is a web of stories, connecting us to one another. Her vivid manuscript carries the stories of trees, fungi, soil and bears--and of a human being listening in on the conversation. The interplay of personal narrative, scientific insights and the amazing revelations about the life of the forest make a compelling story. Dr. Simard’s journey as a scientist embodies the power of curiosity coupled to commitment to listen to the natural world and the courage to share what she has learned, against the resistance of scientific establishment. I have great admiration for her science and her storytelling alike. These are stories that the world needs to hear.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
"It completely overturned my view of nature."--Kristin Ohlson, New York Times bestselling author
"I can think of no one better suited to bring humanity into the process of science."--J. C. Cahill, professor of plant ecology at the University of Alberta
"What Simard is revealing here has implications and potential on the scale of mapping the human genome. Simard is one of this planet's most insightful and eloquent translators."--John Vaillant, bestselling author of The Tiger, Jaguar's Children, and The Golden Spruce
"The stories Simard tells, and the insights she draws from them, will inspire readers and change the way they think about the world around them."--Catherine Gehring, professor of biology at Northern Arizona University
"This book will have profound implications for our human relationships with the natural world. The insights presented by Dr. Simard point toward a complete paradigm shift in the ways we humans interact with forests, trees, and other species."--Nancy Jean Turner, professor of ethnobotany at the University of Victoria, author of The Earth's Blanket
“Galvanizing . . . As Simard elucidates her revolutionary experiments, replete with
gorgeous descriptions and moments of fear and wonder, a vision of the forest as an ‘intelligent, perceptive and responsive,’ comes into focus . . . A masterwork of planetary significance.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Simard artfully blends science with memoir in her eye-opening debut on the ‘startling secrets’ of trees . . . As moving as it is educational, this groundbreaking work entrances.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Simard tells the fascinating story that led Richard Powers to base a character on her in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory . . . intimate . . . absorbing . . . engaging . . . the science is solid, and the author’s overarching theme of stewardship is clear, understandable, and necessary.”—Kirkus
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ghosts in the Forest
I was alone in grizzly country, freezing in the June snow. Twenty years old and green, I was working a seasonal job for a logging company in the rugged Lillooet Mountain Range of western Canada.
The forest was shadowed and deathly quiet. And from where I stood, full of ghosts. One was floating straight toward me. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. My heart lodged in my throat as I tried to summon my rationality—and then I laughed.
The ghost was just heavy fog rolling through, its tendrils encircling the tree trunks. No apparitions, only the solid timbers of my industry. The trees were just trees. And yet Canadian forests always felt haunted to me, especially by my ancestors, the ones who’d defended the land or conquered it, who came to cut, burn, and farm the trees.
It seems the forest always remembers.
Even when we’d like it to forget our transgressions.
It was midafternoon already. Mist crept through the clusters of subalpine firs, coating them with a sheen. Light-refracting droplets held entire worlds. Branches burst with emerald new growth over a fleece of jade needles. Such a marvel, the tenacity of the buds to surge with life every spring, to greet the lengthening days and warming weather with exuberance, no matter what hardships were brought by winter. Buds encoded to unfold with primordial leaves in tune with the fairness of previous summers. I touched some feathery needles, comforted by their softness. Their stomata—the tiny holes that draw in carbon dioxide to join with water to make sugar and pure oxygen—pumped fresh air for me to gulp.
Nestled against the towering, hardworking elders were teenaged saplings, and leaning into them were even younger seedlings, all huddling as families do in the cold. The spires of the wrinkled old firs stretched skyward, sheltering the rest. The way my mother and father, grandmothers and grandfathers protected me. Goodness knows, I’d needed as much care as a seedling, given that I was always getting into trouble. When I was twelve, I’d crawled along a sweeper tree leaning over the Shuswap River to see how far out I could go. I tried to retreat but slipped and fell into the current. Grampa Henry jumped into his hand-built riverboat and grabbed my shirt collar right before I would have disappeared into the rapids.
Snow lay deeper than a grave nine months of the year here in the mountains. The trees far outmatched me, their DNA forged so they’d thrive despite the extremes of an inland climate that would chew me up and spit me out. I tapped a limb of an elder to show gratitude for its hovering over vulnerable offspring and nestled a fallen cone in the crook of a branch.
I pulled my hat over my ears while stepping off the logging road and waded deeper into the forest through the snow. Despite it being only a few hours before darkness, I paused at a log, a casualty of saws that had cleared the road right-of-way. The pale round face of its cut end showed age rings as fine as eyelashes. The blond-colored earlywood, the spring cells plump with water, were edged by dark-brown cells of latewood formed in August when the sun is high and drought settles in. I counted the rings, marking each decade with a pencil—the tree was a couple hundred years old. Over twice the number of years my own family had lived in these forests. How had the trees weathered the changing cycles of growth and dormancy, and how did this compare to the joys and hardships my family had endured in a fraction of the time? Some rings were wider, having grown plenty in rainy years, or perhaps in sunny years after a neighboring tree blew over, and others were almost too narrow to see, having grown slowly during a drought, a cold summer, or some other stress. These trees persisted through climatic upheavals, suffocating competition, and ravaging fire, insect, or wind disruptions, far eclipsing the colonialism, world wars, and the dozen or so prime ministers my family had lived through. They were ancestors to my ancestors.
A chattering squirrel ran along the log, warning me away from his cache of seeds at the base of the stump. I was the first woman to work for the logging company, an outfit that was part of a rough, dangerous business starting to open its doors to the occasional female student. The first day on the job, a few weeks back, I’d visited a clear-cut—a complete felling of trees in a thirty-hectare patch—with my boss, Ted, to check that some new seedlings had been planted according to government rules. He knew how a tree should and should not be planted, and his low-key approach kept workers going through their exhaustion. Ted had been patient with my embarrassment at not knowing a J-root from a deep plug, but I’d watched and listened. Soon enough, I was entrusted with the job of assessing established plantations—seedlings put in to replace harvested trees. I wasn’t about to screw up.
Today’s plantation awaited me beyond this old forest. The company had chopped down a large parcel of velvety old subalpine firs and planted prickly needled spruce seedlings this last spring. My task was to check the progress of those new growths. I hadn’t been able to take the logging road into the clear-cut because it had been washed out—a gift, since I could detour past these mist-wrapped beauties, but I stopped at a massive pile of fresh grizzly scat.
Fog still draped the trees, and I could have sworn something was sliding along in the distance. I looked harder. It was the pale green trusses of the lichen called old man’s beard because of the way it sways from branches. Old lichen that particularly thrived on old trees. I plunged the button on my air horn to warn off the specter of bears. I’d inherited my fear of them from my mother, who was a child when her grandfather, my great-grampa Charles Ferguson, shot and killed one that was inches from mauling her on the porch. Great-Grampa Charles was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century pioneer in Edgewood, an outpost in the Inonoaklin Valley along the Arrow Lakes of the Columbia basin in British Columbia. With axes and horses, he and his wife, Ellen, cleared the Sinixt Nation land they had homesteaded to grow hay and tend cattle. Charles was known to wrestle with bears and shoot wolves that tried to kill his chickens. He and Ellen raised three children: Ivis, Gerald, and my grandmother Winnie.
I crawled over logs covered with moss and mushrooms, inhaling the evergreen mist. One had a river of tiny Mycena mushrooms flowing along the cracks down its length before fanning along a splay of tree roots that dwindled to rotten spindles. I’d been puzzling over what roots and fungi had to do with the health of forests—the harmony of things large and small, including concealed and overlooked elements. My fascination with tree roots had started from my growing up amazed at the irrepressible power of the cottonwoods and willows my parents had planted in our backyard when their massive roots cracked the foundation of our basement, tilted over the doghouse, and heaved up our sidewalk. Mum and Dad fell into worried discussions of what to do with the problem they’d unwittingly created in our little plot of land in trying to reconstruct the feel of trees surrounding their own childhood homes. I’d watched in awe each spring as a multitude of germinants emerged from cottony seeds amid halos of mushrooms fanning around the base of the trees, and I’d become horrified, at eleven, when the city ran a pipeline spewing foamy water into the river beside my house, where the effluent killed the cottonwoods along the shore. First the tops of the crowns thinned, then black cankers appeared around the furrowed trunks, and by the next spring the great trees were dead. No new germinants got established among the yellow outflow. I wrote to the mayor, and my letter went unanswered.
I picked one of the tiny mushrooms. The bell-shaped elf caps of the Mycena were dark brown at the apex and faded into translucent yellow at the margins, revealing gills underneath and a fragile stem. The stipes—stems—were rooted in the furrows of the bark, helping the log decay. These mushrooms were so delicate it seemed impossible they could decompose a whole log. But I knew they could. Those dead cottonwoods along the riverbank in my childhood had fallen and sprouted mushrooms along their thin, cracking skin. Within a few years, the spongy fibers of decayed wood had completely disappeared into the ground. These fungi had evolved a way to break down wood by exuding acids and enzymes and using their cells to absorb the wood’s energy and nutrients. I launched off the log, landed with my caulk spikes in the duff, and grabbed clumps of fir saplings to leverage myself up the slope. The saplings had found a spot to capture a balance between the light of the sun and the wetness of the snowmelt.
A Suillus mushroom—tucked near a seedling that had established a few years back—was wearing a scaly brown pancake cap over a yellow porous underbelly and a fleshy stem that disappeared into the ground. In a burst of rain, the mushroom had sprung out of the dense network of branching fungal threads running deep through the forest floor. Like a strawberry fruiting from its vast, intricate system of roots and runners. With a boost of energy from the earthen threads, the fungal cap had unfurled like an umbrella, leaving traces of a lacy veil hugging the brown-spotted stem about halfway up. I picked the mushroom, this fruit of the fungus that otherwise lived mainly belowground. The cap’s underside was like a sundial of radiating pores. Each oval-shaped opening housed minuscule stalks built to discharge spores like sparks from a firecracker. Spores are the “seeds” of fungi, full of DNA that binds, recombines, and mutates to produce novel genetic material that is diverse and adapted for changing environmental conditions. Sprinkled around the colorful cavity left by the picking was a halo of cinnamon-brown spores. Other spores would have caught an updraft, latched on to the legs of a flying insect, or become the dinner of a squirrel.
Extending downward in the tiny crater still holding the remains of the mushroom’s stem were fine yellow threads, the strands braiding into an intricately branching veil of fungal mycelium, the network that blankets the billions of organic and mineral particles making up the soil. The stem bore broken threads that had been part of this web before I ungraciously ripped it from its moorings. The mushroom is the visible tip of something deep and elaborate, like a thick lace tablecloth knitted into the forest floor. The threads left behind were fanning through the litter—fallen needles, buds, twigs—searching for, entwining with, and absorbing mineral riches. I wondered whether this Suillus mushroom might be a type of decay fungus like the Mycenas, a rotter of wood and litter, or if it had some other role. I stuck it into my pocket along with the Mycena.
The clear-cut where the seedlings replaced the chopped-down trees was still not visible. Dark clouds were gathering, and I pulled my yellow rain jacket out of my vest. It was worn from bushwhacking and not as waterproof as it should have been. Each step farther from the truck added to an aura of danger and my foreboding that I wouldn’t be on the road by nightfall. But I’d inherited an instinct for pushing through hardship from Grannie Winnie, a teenager when her mother, Ellen, succumbed to the flu in the early 1930s. The family was snowed in and bedridden, with Ellen dead in her room, when the neighbors finally broke through the frozen valley and chest-deep snow to check on the Ferguson clan.
My boot slipped, and I grabbed a sapling, which came loose in my hand as I tumbled down the pitch, flattening other saplings before coming to rest against a sodden log, still clutching the octopus of jagged roots. The young tree looked to be a teenager, the whorls of lateral branches demarcating each year adding up to about fifteen. A rain cloud started to spit, soaking my jeans. Drops beaded on the oilskin of my scruffy jacket.
There was no room for weakness on this job, and I’d cultivated a tough exterior in a boy’s world for as long as I could remember. I wanted to be as good as my younger brother, Kelly, and the ones who had Québécois names like Leblanc and Gagnon and Tremblay, so I learned to play street ice hockey with the neighborhood gang when the temperature was minus twenty. I played goalie, the least coveted position. They took hard shots at my knees, but I kept my black-and-blue legs concealed under my jeans. The way Grannie Winnie kept on as best she could, resuming her job of galloping her horse through the Inonoaklin Valley, delivering mail and flour to the homesteads, soon after her mother died.
I stared at the clump of roots in my fist. Clinging to them was glistening humus that reminded me of chicken manure. Humus is the greasy black rot in the forest floor sandwiched between the fresh litter from fallen needles and dying plants above and the mineral soil weathered from bedrock below. Humus is the product of plant decay. It’s where the dead plants and bugs and voles are buried. Nature’s compost. Trees love to root in the humus, not so much above or below it, because there they can access the bounty of nutrients.
But these root tips were glowing yellow, like lights on a Christmas tree, and they ended in a gossamer of mycelium of the same color. The threads of this streaming mycelium looked close to the same color as those radiating into the soil from the stems of the Suillus mushrooms, and from my pocket I took out the one I’d picked. I held the clump of root tips with its cascading yellow gossamer in one hand and the Suillus mushroom with its broken mycelium in the other. I studied them closely, but I could not tell them apart.
Maybe Suillus was a friend of the roots, not a decomposer of dead things as Mycena was? My instinct has always been to listen to what living things are saying. We think that most important clues are large, but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small. I began to dig into the forest floor. The yellow mycelium seemed to coat every minuscule particle of soil. Hundreds of miles of threads running under my palms. No matter the lifestyle, these fungal branching filaments, called hyphae—along with the mushroom fruit they spawned—appeared to be only a smattering of the vast mycelium in the soil.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition, Second Printing (May 4, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 052565609X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525656098
- Item Weight : 1.6 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.36 x 9.52 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #199,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #122 in Trees in Biological Sciences
- #619 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #5,932 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Finding The Mother Tree
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About the author
Suzanne Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and the author of the upcoming book, Finding the Mother Tree (May 4th 2021).
She is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; and has been hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
Suzanne is known for her work on how trees interact and communicate using below-ground fungal networks, which has led to the recognition that forests have hub trees, or Mother Trees, which are large, highly connected trees that play an important role in the flow of information and resources in a forest. Her current research investigates how these complex relationships contribute to forest resiliency, adaptability and recovery and has far-reaching implications for how to manage and heal forests from human impacts, including climate change.
Suzanne has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and presented at conferences around the world. She has communicated her work to a wide audience through interviews, documentary films and her TEDTalk “How trees talk to one another”.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book informative and well-written, providing an understanding of the interconnectedness of the forest and its importance to our planet. They describe it as a charming read with a good dose of science. The writing quality is described as rich and well-crafted, with attention to detail. Readers appreciate the personal story and the author's love for nature. Overall, they describe the book as a wonderful look deep inside nature with phenomenal photos.
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Customers find the book informative and engaging. They appreciate the author's skill in explaining complex biological and ecological concepts while incorporating her personal journey. The book provides an understanding of the interconnectedness of the forest and its importance to our planet. Readers enjoy the science aspects and references for further reading. Overall, they describe it as a unique opportunity to learn and appreciate how little we know.
"...She takes us to the forest and her laboratory, and invites us into her research and analysis, sharing the thrill of discovery and the development..." Read more
"The book is very detailed in terms of science, forestry, and botany...." Read more
"...but has always been repulsed by clear cuts, this was a unique opportunity to learn and to appreciate how little we understand about the way nature..." Read more
"...I loved the science aspects of the book. Simard explains how mycorrhizas - an association between fungi and trees - are mutually beneficial to both...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe it as a fascinating read about the interconnected community of trees. Readers say it's worth staying with until the end, a must-read for all, and a great follow-up to The Overstory.
"...She fashions a compelling read and an intimate autobiography. This book is intriguing on a number of levels, and you come away with a new..." Read more
"A wonderful and humble telling of how a scientist makes new knowledge from the perspective of the challenges of everyday life...." Read more
"Great folow up after reading the Overstory" Read more
"Simard has written a lovely memoir with a good dose of forest ecology and botany thrown in...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's writing quality. They appreciate the rich prose, well-constructed content, and author's attention to detail. The author weaves stories of her own family into the content. The book is described as easy to read and brings science and knowledge together.
"...An engaging writer, she also weaves in her family life and her struggles with established science and industrial practices...." Read more
"...I especially appreciate that most of the writing is easily accessible to those of us who are not scientists and not knowledgeable about forests." Read more
"A wonderful and humble telling of how a scientist makes new knowledge from the perspective of the challenges of everyday life...." Read more
"...This book is a gem both for the content and quality of its presentation. I will be giving many copies as gifts." Read more
Customers find the story engaging and entertaining. They describe it as a nice, fascinating account of a beautiful soul butting heads with science. The book is described as an effective blend of science, personal story, and the author's profound insights.
"...This book is a well-merited and greatly enjoyed celebration of our curiosity. Reading this book is like a series of coffees with a bright and..." Read more
"An dramatic, first person scientific discovery journey...." Read more
"...The book was entertaining and informative." Read more
"Every piece of it is relevant. This is a remarkable story of observation with science - to study the PNW ecosystem, starting with the sawyer..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's love for nature. They find it a meaningful memoir about their inner-connectedness with the forest and trees. The book teaches them that their love of trees is well-founded, and it will appeal to nature lovers around the world. Readers describe the trees as intelligent beings with a legacy of forest wisdom.
"...This is also a celebration of one’s curiosity and our emotional connections to the earth and other living beings. “Finding the Mother Tree..." Read more
"The book is very detailed in terms of science, forestry, and botany...." Read more
"...written a lovely memoir with a good dose of forest ecology and botany thrown in...." Read more
"...Your legacy is forest wisdom. By developing relationships, we readers can connect with the world wood web and help nature do its business." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's beauty. They find it an excellent look into nature with phenomenal photos. The book is described as a memoir, an introductory science text, and a love letter to nature and trees.
"...The last chapter of her book is beautiful and profound...." Read more
"...There are also some beautiful pictures of forest environments, some in color and some black and white...." Read more
"My daughter loves nature and trees. I gave her this as a gift, was highly recommended to me wonderful book." Read more
"...And there are plenty of photos to help the reader visualize the experience. This book is a gem both for the content and quality of its presentation...." Read more
Customers praise the author's passion and dedication. They appreciate her emotional value and perseverance.
"For your endless energy, strong voice, dedication and persistence and most of all for never giving up in your pursuit of knowledge and understanding...." Read more
"...Thank you for your integrity and passion; and for teaching us the importance of listening with all of our senses." Read more
"...Intelligence, compassion and wisdom are all adjectives that can credibly be applied to the web…and to Dr. Simard herself who, frankly, should be..." Read more
"...And then is here a dedicated being, writing a humble book, about the most intricate interconnection one can only dream of...." Read more
Customers find the book helpful for understanding climate change and its impact on forests. They say it covers complex biological and ecological concepts in a clear manner. The book is considered essential for the health of the planet and its inhabitants, especially by biologists and ecologists.
"...of levels, and you come away with a new understanding of ecology, climate change, and the complexity of nature...." Read more
"Simard was brilliant in explaining complex biological and ecological concepts, while incorporating her deeply personal journey through discovery...." Read more
"A world we have no idea of.....yet essential to the health of our planet, to human beings and to our own mental sanity!..." Read more
"...than that, the trees of the world have the ability to save humankind from accelerating climate change, if only enough people sign up to protecting..." Read more
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2021Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard (2021)
Part of the master gardener’s experience is a heightened awakening to the complexities of relationships in the plant world, and how we can explore that and broaden our own relationship with life and the world. This book is a well-merited and greatly enjoyed celebration of our curiosity.
Reading this book is like a series of coffees with a bright and curious friend who thrives on looking into the unanswered questions of how plants grow and how rich the world is in relationships.
Simard, now a professor of ecology at the University of British Columbia, is the third generation of loggers and farmers. Her childhood curiosity and fascination with forests led her to pursue a career in forestry and ecology. She struggled with the established forest practices of clearcutting and indiscriminate spraying, and began researching the role of various fungal networks (mycorrizae). Her writing engaged me and I too became curious about fungus in the forest. I found it hard to put the book down.
She takes us to the forest and her laboratory, and invites us into her research and analysis, sharing the thrill of discovery and the development of her thinking. An engaging writer, she also weaves in her family life and her struggles with established science and industrial practices. Part memoir, part heroic tale, part mystery, and part botanical adventure and intrigue, the book is hard to put down. She fashions a compelling read and an intimate autobiography.
This book is intriguing on a number of levels, and you come away with a new understanding of ecology, climate change, and the complexity of nature. This is also a celebration of one’s curiosity and our emotional connections to the earth and other living beings.
“Finding the Mother Tree promises to change our understanding about what is really going on when a tree falls in the forest, and other pressing mysteries of the natural world.” --- Michael Pollan
- Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2024The book is very detailed in terms of science, forestry, and botany. At times it felt like too many details for someone unfamiliar with the topic, but it never lost my interest. The detailed accounts of the research were accompanied by details of the life of Suzanne Simard while she struggled with being heard in an industry that values more production over preservation. We accompany her through her research as well as her life, including grief, nostalgia, romance, sickness, etc. in other words, we see a complete human being figuring herself out while working for nature and against its destruction
- Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2024This autobiographical book takes us along the author’s journey from curious student to brilliant scientist as she asks, investigates, and then conclusively proves that forests are massive neural networks amazingly analogous to our human neural network.
As someone who knows almost nothing about forests but has always been repulsed by clear cuts, this was a unique opportunity to learn and to appreciate how little we understand about the way nature works. It’s a resounding rebuttal to our human beliefs in mankind’s inherent superiority over all else and that the whole world is built around a competition model. I especially appreciate that most of the writing is easily accessible to those of us who are not scientists and not knowledgeable about forests.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2024A wonderful and humble telling of how a scientist makes new knowledge from the perspective of the challenges of everyday life. Not being a scientist myself, I didn't get as much out of the more detailed description s of the natural processes as others might.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2024Great folow up after reading the Overstory
- Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2021Simard has written a lovely memoir with a good dose of forest ecology and botany thrown in. Simard intertwines the story of her family and her discoveries as a scientist. I loved the science aspects of the book. Simard explains how mycorrhizas - an association between fungi and trees - are mutually beneficial to both. Furthermore, she discovered that this mycorrhizal association permits trees of different species and fungi to signal each other about stresses in the environment (e.g., fire, insects) with the larger, older trees able to provide sustenance to younger trees. Simard's struggles in the male-dominated field of forestry prove time and again that it doesn't take much for a talented woman to be dismissed as "difficult." Her discoveries are now accepted science. Simard is candid about how her professional life created much stress on her family and her struggle with cancer it poignant.
The last chapter of her book is beautiful and profound. Simard concludes "I have come full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: Diversity matters. And everything in the universe is connected—between the forests and prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all other creatures." Highly recommended.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2024An dramatic, first person scientific discovery journey. Identifying what native Americans understood, but apply scientific principles to document and to start official policy to agree there is an interdependence among trees of different species. They support each other. The Mother Tree supports and feeds her large family of growing trees. A very surprising interdependence link is discovered at the last chapter.
Top reviews from other countries
- LvOReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 3, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Blown away by the resilience shown in this book
I loved this book. There were, I'll admit, parts of it where my eyes glazed over when they were talking about isotopes and labelling and carbon this and that, but Finding the Mother Tree is a book about the story of an amazing life dedicated to understanding her native trees in British Columbia. This book is the story behind the science, and I thought it was fantastic.
A daughter of a logging family, Suzanne Simard was the first female logger for the company she started out in. She became interested in the health of the forest once trees had been logged and sprayed by chemicals such as Roundup, and brought her findings to conferences, hoping policy makers and bosses would listen, but they did not. In fact she was ridiculed, vilified and mocked.
I am blown away by her resilience in the face of that mockery, and love how - like her trees - she surrounded herself with people she benefitted from, as they did from her. Her friends and family became her own mycorrhizal network, through days, weeks and months spent in the forest and one the road, time separated from her daughters and through a cancer diagnosis.
Through it all she kept finding out more and more about the relationships between trees, when they feed each other, when they heal each other. She networked with other female scientists (and some male) across the world and they made discoveries that those of us who work in outdoor therapies now take for granted. I have been sharing this book far and wide because I feel indignant that so many books have been written based on her work, yet this is the first time I've ever heard her name.
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Valny Giacomelli SobrinhoReviewed in Brazil on June 7, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazon tree
Entregue dentro do prazo e só então o valor a ser pago foi descontado
- SternfallReviewed in Germany on May 23, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Forests are integral ecosystems and their dignity needs to be respected.
Beautiful and moving life story of an intelligent and warm-hearted women. Thanks to her great love of forests, her perseverence , and cleverly conducted experiments we have solid scientific evidence that clear-cutting and weeding are not only harming the integral ecosystem of forests and aggravating climate change, but that these practices are not even economically sound, as the "cash-crops trees" are vulnerable and tend to wither prematurely. Let's hope that governments around the world get the message and introduce regulations that enforce sensible forest-managing rules.
- GafsanReviewed in Sweden on May 6, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Good!
Good! Thank you!
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C. R. PalmaReviewed in Spain on December 30, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars As árvores é que nos salvam
O trabalho da investigadora Suzanne Simard é fundamental para melhorarmos o nosso entendimento do que é uma floresta e este livro acaba por nos trazer a história de vida dela ao mesmo tempo que nos descreve a evolução dos seus trabalhos de pesquisa. Por vezes é difícil acompanhar as descrições da autora (as espécies não são as nossas, os termos por vezes são técnicos) mas esta é uma história de amor. Vi há pouco tempo uma entrevista em que ela afirmava: "This is not about us saving the trees, it is about the trees saving us". É isso, mesmo...