Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance.

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. But Dad’s mother was so keenly aware of the peril in bush work that it gave her pause.

What had happened to that little girl who ate dirt? Who’d made braids of roots, entranced by complex natural wonders? Places of terrible beauty and layered earth and buried secrets. My childhood was shouting at me: The forest is an integrated whole.

Ah, yes. In a class I’d taken on soils, the professor had mentioned mycorrhizas so briefly, so in passing, that I hadn’t taken any notes. He was teaching an agriculture class, not a forestry course. Scientists had recently figured out that mycorrhizal fungi helped food crops grow because the fungi could reach scarce minerals, nutrients, and water that the plants couldn’t. Adding fertilizers full of minerals and nutrients, or providing irrigation, artificially took care of things, causing the fungi to disappear. When the plants didn’t have reason to spend energy investing in fungi to meet their needs, they cut off the flow of resources. Foresters hadn’t considered mycorrhizal fungi all that helpful to trees, at least not enough to teach about it, but a little thought had gone into inoculating nursery-grown seedlings with fungal spores to see if they helped the new shoots grow. But inconsistent results made it far easier to pour on fertilizer than cultivate healthy mycorrhizas. I chuckled at the humanness of this—we are always looking for the quick fix. With a little effort, we could apply a more sustainable method by encouraging the development of the highly coevolved mycorrhizal relationships. Instead, foresters ignored the mycorrhizas, or—worse—killed them with fertilizer and irrigation in the seedling nursery, and focused only on those fungi that damaged or killed big trees, the pathogens. Those parasitic fungal species that infected roots and stems, damaged wood, and so...

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.

The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth.”

“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.”