Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

the paltry rates of photosynthesis by the cotyledons,

Simile

A web of life like our own cardiovascular system of arteries, veins, and capillaries.

Simile anthropomorphism

9 hours! She must be exhausted!

François,

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.

Anthropomorphism

to be home by midnight, I needed to leave by four p.m.

This forest was like the Internet too—the

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,

Communication on the ‘net routes around damage

the “wood-wide web,”

Mary

Tam McArthur Rim in Oregon.

mountain pine beetle,”

blue-stain fungus

Lupines

grouseberry

suppression of fire had allowed many trees to reach such an old age and large size that their phloem was thick enough to support a teeming brood of larvae.

more than 40 million hectares now dead or dying across North America.

With winter temperatures no longer dropping to minus thirty degrees Celsius for long enough periods to kill the larvae feeding in the phloem, the finely tuned symbiosis among the species had ruptured.

“Some will live, but most will die,”

monoterpenes—to

Subalpine firs

the western spruce budworm,

Dr. Yuan Yuan Song,

Yuan Yuan had already found that tomato plants communicated their stresses to other nearby tomatoes, and we were both curious if similar signals might occur between trees.

whiskey jack

beargrass

eleven hundred kilometers to the north.

Good night!

Mary time. Was I in love?

Robyn and Bill’s

Fire risk has increased rapidly in the small towns of British Columbia due to climate change.

Anthropomorphism

Thompson River

found a few two-year-olds huddled in a crevice. These siblings were all that remained to carry the Mother Tree’s genes.

Anthropomorphism

the drooping awns of cheatgrass—a

dying grasses shuttled phosphorus and nitrogen to their offspring through arbuscular mycorrhizal networks

The trees had perished so swiftly, and the beetles had spread so rapidly and the summers warmed so quickly, that it seemed nature had no time to figure this out, to keep up with the changes.

How sad

childhood,

Anthropomorphism

cheatgrass—along

knapweed

common burdoc...

These plants, with their prolific seed production and rapid growth rates, could easily invade a forest weakened by fire suppression and extreme climate.

These trees seemed sacrificed for the sake of human convenience.

neighbor

Anthropomorphism

neighbor’s genes

Monashee Pass,

Arrow Lakes,

the white spider in my breast.