Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

But nothing lives on our planet without death and decay. From this springs new life, and from this birth will come new death. This spiral of living taught me to become a sower of seeds too, a planter of seedlings, a keeper of saplings, a part of the cycle.

I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied.

A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We think that most important clues are large, but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small.

loved it when Al and Rascal drove me home from work, and Al would lean out and bark at the chasing dogs, which always yelped and ran the other way, much to his delight. I found this extremely funny, which egged him on to bark even louder.

I often feared I’d been hired into the men’s club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth.

back-arming foam off his mustache—someone must hand those out the moment a man opts for a life in the woods.

I was born to the wild. I come from the wild.

The more worms, the richer and tastier the humus, and I’d been an enthusiastic dirt eater from the moment I could crawl.

fools and newcomers try to predict the weather.”

I have a tradition of trusting that nature is resilient, that the earth will rebound and come to my rescue even when nature turns violent.

Once you start hunting, it’s easy to get addicted. Like always wanting to snag the tallest peaks. After a while, your appetite can never be sated.

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 mycorrhizal symbiosis was credited with the migration of ancient plants from the ocean to land about 450 to 700 million years ago. Colonization of plants with fungi enabled them to acquire sufficient nutrients from the barren, inhospitable rock to gain a toehold and survive on land. These authors were suggesting that cooperation was essential to evolution.

I pushed up the sash of the cracked window above my bed to let in the breezes rolling down from the precipitous mountain behind the bunkhouse. They blew in the scent of the trees and the sound of the creek and bathed my arms.

What is it about pushing our limits that makes us stronger? How does suffering strengthen the relationships that hold us together? I loved the generous rhythm of the way the land and the forest and the rivers came together to refresh the winds at the close of each day. Helped settle us all down for the night. Air purified by the ancient forests hovered, and I let the downdraft cleanse me.

“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.”

I refilled our cups, the rich wine coursing through our veins and making the stars glow.

Riding bikes up steep mountain roads until you’re too exhausted to feel anything. Hiking ridgelines in sunshine so brilliant you crack a smile.

He was a talker. His words came in rushes, in rapids, and I loved it.

Nitrogen is essential for the building of proteins, enzymes, and DNA, the stuff of leaves and photosynthesis and evolution. Without it, plants can’t grow.

We established a pattern of bicycle rides to campus, noon runs along country roads, and meals in the garden. We picked apples and huckleberries, and he made pies. He’d planted tomatoes and squashes to make stews for dinner parties with friends, where his easy, loquacious conversations let me relax in spite of my shyness.

“But you can’t hide if you want change.”

I thought of some friends who’d plucked their eyebrows so thoroughly that they no longer grew back.

pulled a wrinkled map from the pocket of my rust-stained jeans. I loved maps; they led to adventure, discovery.

Beating myself up, but doing so out in the forest, which I knew on some level, even in my anguish, held the promise of healing.

Sometimes, when the worst happens, we are no longer afraid of the things that used to scare us. The small things. The things that aren’t a matter of life and death. I threw myself into my research, if only to bury my despair at what I couldn’t repair, trying to find, in my connections to the trees, what I’d lost forever with my brother.

Driving the back roads with my hair in tangles and the seat covered in maps and empty coffee cups stuffed with apple cores.

I followed the “three-sisters” technique developed by the Native Americans, who grow corn, squash, and beans as companions to enhance the growth of them all.

Garden plants usually associate with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, unlike the ectomycorrhizal fungi on most trees. There are only a couple hundred arbuscular mycorrhizal species worldwide, compared to the thousands of ectomycorrhizal species. These arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are generalists, meaning that even the few species that exist in nature can colonize the roots and should link most of the garden vegetable plants. Like corn, squash, beans, peas, tomatoes, onions, carrots, eggplant, lettuce, garlic, potatoes, yams.

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.

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.

Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system. And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, and we can learn from experience. A system is ever changing because its parts—the trees and fungi and people—are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.

With Hannah in a sling, sleeping on my breast, I’d walk the trails for hours, through swatches of spring-green pinegrass and patches of the yellow flowers named butter-and-eggs, and nodding purple and brown chocolate lilies, under the huddles of firs and ponderosa pines and aspens.

And he was right about raising the girls in the city. We did have to keep a closer eye on them, and we needed to drive them to gymnastics and bike camps rather than just let them play in the forest beside the house. Don

Glutamate was the most abundant neurotransmitter in the human brain, and it set the stage for other neurotransmitters to develop. It was even more abundant than serotonin, whose carbon-to-nitrogen ratio was only slightly greater.

Could information be transmitted across synapses in mycorrhizal networks, the same way it happens in our brains? Amino acids, water, hormones, defense signals, allelochemicals (poisons), and other metabolites were already known to cross the synapse between the fungal and plant membranes. Any molecules arriving by way of the mycorrhizal network from another tree might also be transmitted through the synapse.

Whitebark depends on Clark’s nutcrackers to disperse its seeds, whereas lodgepole needs fire to open its cones.

pointed to the tallest one of the bunch and said that Mother Trees are the biggest, oldest ones.

I had that old sense of falling, softly and deeply, like snow settling on the mountains.

Every little thing is gonna be all right. I was a forest dweller, backpacker, backcountry skier, organic-food eater, nonsmoker, mother of two breastfed children.

What the trees were conveying made sense. Over millions of years, they’d evolved for survival, built relationships with their mutualists and competitors, and they were integrated with their partners in one system.

Germinants struggling to survive in the deep shade, or during the summer dry spell, could live instead of die with the slightest boost, the smallest of advantages, if it came at the right time. Not only that, the bigger the Mother Tree, the healthier she was, the more carbon she gave.

Maybe clear-cutting the old, even if they’re not well, wasn’t such a good idea. The dying still have much to give. We already knew the elders were habitat for old-growth-dependent birds and mammals and fungi. That old trees stored far more carbon than young ones. They protected the prodigious amounts hidden in the soil, and they were the sources of fresh water and clean air. Those old souls have been through great changes, and this affected their genes. Through the changes, they’d gathered crucial wisdom, and they offered this up to their offspring—providing protection, laps into which the new generations got started, the foundation from which to grow.

“Your body will follow your thoughts, so think healing thoughts.”