Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

I’d driven through many forests in the years leading up to my master’s to see what these plantations looked like on the inside, getting out of my truck and wading into the alders crowding the road. Once through this wall of green, I’d usually discover pines growing beautifully. But seeing an ocean of alder from the roadside, even if many pines were poking through, was all foresters needed to justify a chemical assault or a literal hack job with saws or clippers. But to what avail? No one knew whether this weeding was improving plantation growth. My experiment aimed to help fill that knowledge gap. I wanted to quantify the competitive effect of the alders and associated plants on the pines. Even more interesting to me was whether the native shrubs might actually collaborate with the pines to help them connect with the soil and create a healthy forest community. To see how—and if—alder might interfere with pine, I had to reduce the abundance of the shoulder-height shrubs to different densities, including total elimination in some plots.