Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin. The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.

When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.

The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing. This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.

My colleagues were drawing up plans for the next clear-cuts, to keep the mill going and their families fed, and I understood this need too. But the saws wouldn’t stop until whole valleys were gone.

“The Coast Salish say that the trees also teach about their symbiotic nature. That under the forest floor, there are fungi that keep the trees connected and strong.”

Stretching its prodigious limbs where songbirds roosted and nested. And where wolf lichens and mistletoes found crevices in which to root. Letting—needing—squirrels to run up and down its trunk in search of cones to store in middens for later meals. And to hang mushrooms in the crooks of branches to dry and eat. This tree alone was a scaffold for diversity, fueling the cycles of the forest.

Get rid of the competition. Once the light, water, and nutrients were freed up by obliterating the native plants, the lucrative conifers would suck them up and grow as fast as a redwood. A zero-sum game. Winners take all.

I was heartbroken by the relentless harvesting, and it was my responsibility to stand up. To act against the government policies that I felt weakened the tree-soil links. The land. Our connection to the forest.

moving on to the data from my weather station, showing how killing all the plants made local climates more extreme—blistering hot during the day and frosty at the soil surface during the night.

trees are tightly attuned, shifting their behaviors according to the functioning of their community.

Birch and fir were trading carbon. They were communicating. Birch was detecting and staying attuned to the needs of fir. Not only that, I’d discovered that fir gave some carbon back to birch too. As though reciprocity was part of their everyday relationship.

Regardless of the presence of discrete mycorrhizal networks, all the plants in this forest belonged to one another.

Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.

Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have these elements of intelligence helps us leave behind old notions that they are inert, simple, linear, and predictable.

Overestimating the threat of a few birch neighbors could bring unexpected consequences, potentially setting the forest up for a vulnerable future, where lowered biodiversity might reduce productivity, increase risk of poor health, and augment the spread of fire.

These old-growth forests were able to self-regenerate because the parents helped the young get on their own two feet. Eventually, the young ones would take over the tree line and reach out to others requiring a boost.

The forest seemed like a system of centers and satellites, where the old trees were the biggest communication hubs and the smaller ones the less-busy nodes, with messages transmitting back and forth through the fungal links.

Or starving them, taking over their energy, degrading the native prairie. Like the invasion of the body snatchers. Or the colonization of the Americas by Europeans.

I pulled out a pencil and notebook. I made a map: Mother Trees, saplings, seedlings. Lines sketched between them. Emerging from my drawing was a pattern like a neural network, like the neurons in our brains, with some nodes more highly linked than others. Holy smokes. If the mycorrhizal network is a facsimile of a neural network, the molecules moving among trees were like neurotransmitters.

The new grant would eventually show us that the complex mycorrhizal network unraveled into chaos with clear-cutting. With the Mother Trees gone, a forest would lose its gravitas.

Grown intimately together, this forest had almost twice the productivity of the stands where we’d trenched between the species two decades earlier. This was the opposite of the usual foresters’ expectations.

When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print.

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.

Nature itself had blurred the rigidity of my experiment, my original hypotheses about species composition and density no longer testable due to the ingress of new trees. But I had learned so much more by listening instead of imposing my will and demanding answers.

Dying enabled the living; the aged fueled their young.

the synergy that reductionist science so often misses, leading us to mistakenly simplify our societies and ecosystems.

The impact has become too devastating to ignore. We can compare the condition of the land where it has been torn apart, each resource treated in isolation from the rest, to where it has been cared for according to the Secwepemc principal of k̓wseltktnews (translated as “we are all related”) or the Salish concept of nə́c̓aʔmat ct (“we are one”). 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. This begins by recognizing that trees and plants have agency. They perceive, relate, and communicate; they exercise various behaviors. They cooperate, make decisions, learn, and remember—qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom, intelligence. By noting how trees, animals, and even fungi—any and all nonhuman species—have this agency, we can acknowledge that they deserve as much regard as we accord ourselves. We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.

It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse.