Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans. They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care. But now we know Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring. Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhizas of their kin but to other members of the community. To help keep it whole. They appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters. Conveying their life energy, their wisdom, to carry life forward. The yews too were in this web, in relationship with their lifelong companions, and with people like me recovering from illness or just walking through their groves.

“Why are the plants so sweet under the birches, Auntie Suzie?” she asked. Their roots and fungi draw water from deep in the soil, I told her, and with it bring calcium, magnesium, and other minerals, and this feeds the leaves so they can make sugars.

“This pancake mushroom is the fruit of the underground network,”

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.

I imagined the flow of energy from the Mother Trees as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child. I knew that power in myself even before I’d uncovered these forest conversations.

An old cedar tree could hold a thousand-year record of salmon runs.

The concept of the Mother Tree and her connections to those around her had even made it into Hollywood, as a central concept to the tree in the film Avatar.

Of late I’ve become increasingly enchanted by the story told by Subiyay, who talks of the trees as people. Not only with a sort of intelligence—akin to us humans—or even a spiritual quality perhaps not unlike ours. Not merely as equivalent to people, with the same bearings. They are people. The Tree People.

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.

There is no moment too small in the world. Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose, and everything is in need of care. This is my creed. Let us embrace it. We can watch it rise. Just like that, at any time—all the time—wealth and grace will soar.