Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

A complete replanting using the same kinds of seedlings and methods—shovel planting one-year-old plug stock that is mass-produced in nurseries—felt like the cheapest way for the company to go, but not if we had to keep returning because of the same dismal result. Something different needed to be done to re-establish this forest, but what? Plant subalpine fir? No nurseries had it available for planting, and it wasn’t considered a future cash crop. We could plant spruce seedlings with bigger root systems. But the roots would still die if they couldn’t sprout strong new tips. Or we could plant them so their roots touched the yellow fungal web in the soil. Maybe the yellow gossamer would keep my seedlings healthy. But the rules required that the roots be planted in the underlying granular mineral soil, not the humus—figuring that the grains of sand, silt, and clay held more water late in the summer and therefore offered a better chance of survival—and the fungus mainly lived in the humus. Water, it was thought, was the most crucial resource that soils needed to supply roots so seedlings would survive. There seemed a very low chance of a change in policy so we could plant the roots in a way that they could reach the yellow fungal threads.