Terraforming, Mountain Laurel, Mycorrhizae, and the Primordial Soup

I’m working on a prequel series to my Waking Late trilogy.  It’s much closer in time to the original settlement of Nwwwlf, and has thus forced me to think about terraforming and how one would bring Earth’s flora, fauna, and microbial infrastructure to a new world to make it a clone of Earth.  That was the original plan for the hapless ancestors of my Waking Late characters, who thought they were heading for a terraformed Earth clone.  Instead, they are stuck on the wrong planet, one with its...