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January 13 - February 20, 2023
Old western white pines are absent from these forests today because of white pine blister rust, introduced from Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Could the old trees be helping the young ones by passing them water through root grafts? Grafts were unions where roots of different trees spliced into a single root, with phloem shared in common, like veins grown together in a healing skin graft.
The cord was linking the fungal-coated root tips of the Douglas fir to the truffle. The tips were also the source of the fungal threads fanning over the soil pores. The truffle, the cord, the hyphal fans, and the root tips were tethered into a single whole.
The fungal cells grew in a web around each plant cell, like a hair net covering a chef’s head. The plant passed photosynthetic sugars through its cell walls to the adjacent fungal cell. The fungus needed this sugary meal to grow its network of fungal threads through the soil to pick up water and nutrients. In return, the fungus delivered these soil resources back to the plant, through the layers of pressed-together fungal and plant cell walls, in a two-way market exchange for the photosynthetic sugars.
The arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi of grasses only grow inside the root cells. They’re invisible. Not like the ectomycorrhizal fungi, which grow on the outside of the root cells of trees and shrubs, like tuques.
The scattered alders help replenish the nitrogen gassed out by the wildfire. They do this by supporting special symbiotic bacteria in their roots that convert the nitrogen gas back into forms that the plants and trees can use.
The roots of the lichens—the rhizines—exuded enzymes to break down rock, while the lichens’ bodies contributed organic material, and together they made humus for plants to root and grow.
Pine got nitrogen from alder not through the soil at all but thanks to mycorrhizal fungi! As though alder were sending vitamins to pine directly, through a pipeline. After mycorrhizal fungi colonized alder roots, the fungal threads grew toward the pine roots and linked the plants.
if legumes passed nitrogen to corn, for instance, we could mix crops and stop having to pollute the soil with fertilizers and herbicides.
The cedars were glowing where the birch cast a cool shadow, protecting their delicate chloroplasts from the high sun. Where the birch leaves could not reach, the cedars were tanned red to prevent damage to their chlorophyll.
was the early 1990s, and I’d heard about climate change in a noon-hour seminar at Oregon State University and was thunderstruck to learn of the catastrophe being predicted. When I’d returned to Canada with the news, the managers at the Forest Service hadn’t believed me.
A raven flew over and called in a low croak. I remembered that the Nlaka’pamux, on whose land we had performed this experiment, see the raven as a symbol of change.
Paper birch and Douglas fir were trading photosynthetic carbon back and forth through the network. Even more stunning, Douglas fir received far more carbon from paper birch than it donated in return. Far from birch being the “demon weed,” it was generously giving fir resources.
Unlike what happened in the summer, when birch sent more carbon to fir, Douglas fir in spring and fall sent more carbon to birch. This trading system between the two species, shifting with the seasons, suggested that the trees were in a sophisticated exchange pattern, possibly reaching a balance over the course of a year.
the “three-sisters” technique developed by the Native Americans, who grow corn, squash, and beans as companions to enhance the growth of them all.
Plants are attuned to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. A balance that can also be achieved in the simple beauty of a garden. In the complex society of ants. There’s grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals. We can find this in ourselves, in what we do alone, but also in what we enact together. Our own roots and systems interlace and tangle, grow into and away from one another and back again in a million subtle moments. —
There should be a special word for the type of mourning you know is to come.
The oldest Rocky Mountain juniper is about 1,500 years old and the oldest whitebark pine around 1,300, in Utah and Idaho, respectively.
The fungus delivers nutrients, supplied by the vast mycelium of the old trees, to the seedling through this Hartig net. The seedling in return provides the fungus with its tiny but essential sum of photosynthetic carbon.
The pine’s defense enzymes—four of them—had dramatically increased in perfect synchrony with the carbon dump, and this occurred only if the pines were linked belowground to the firs. Even slight injury to the firs elicited an enzyme response in the pine. The firs were communicating their stress to the pines within twenty-four hours.
“The amounts are small,” Amanda said, “but the Mother Trees are sending more carbon to the mycorrhizal fungi of their kin than the others! Kin-recognition molecules seem to have carbon and micronutrients.”
Nature itself had blurred the rigidity of my experiment,
The Mother Trees not only sent carbon to help support their mycorrhizal fungal symbionts, they somehow enhanced the health of their kin. And not only their kin, but of strangers too, and other species, promoting the diversity of the community.
If we are equal to everything in nature, do we share the same goals in death? To pass the wand as best we can. Passing onward to children the most crucial material.
the mycorrhizal fungal community in the salmon forest differs depending on the number of salmon returning to their natal streams.
We must heed the answers we’re being given. I believe this kind of transformative thinking is what will save us. It is a philosophy of treating the world’s creatures, its gifts, as of equal importance to us.
Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all. The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out.
