Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

I dug through sheets of hard clay, each layer cloaked in black fans of fungal threads. I held a clump close to my eye and saw the tiny threads growing straight into the soil pores. Working my knife through the layers, I realized that every single sheet was coated in the fungal network. I hit a soft spot, as if I’d poked a cooked potato, and carved through the clay until a dark, round truffle stared back at me, its black rind fissured. I swept aside the surrounding soil, as though I were on an archeological dig looking for shards of bone, until I could get my fingers all the way around the tuber. As the hole grew to the size of my foot, I uncovered a fungal strand flowing out of the truffle. It looked like a thick black umbilical cord, wiry and tough, and made of many individual fungal strands twisted and packed together like ribbons around a maypole. The strands themselves came out of the black fans caking the clay sheets before knitting themselves into one. The cord was packed into the clay, so I chiseled off more soil to see where it went. With about fifteen minutes of work, I followed it to a whitish-purplish cluster of fat Douglas-fir root tips. I poked the tips with my knife—they had the same softness and texture as a mushroom. I stared at the excavation, my mind whirling. 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...