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

by Suzanne Simard

Somehow with my Latin squares and factorial designs, my isotopes and mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, and my training to consider only sharp lines of statistically significant differences, I have come full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: 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. We walked in the drizzle to where I’d planted conifers at different densities, to see how they liked growing in pure stands with few neighbors, or many. I knew every tree, every plot, every corner post. I knew where the larch was planted and the cedar. The fir and the birch. I showed the girls how this fir was planted too deep, that birch had been broken by a moose, this larch got pushed sideways by a black bear. I’d planted another spot every year for five years, but a tree would never take, and now it was a beautiful patch of lilies, what it was meant to be. In the mixed plots, cedars were luxuriant under birches, needing their cover to protect the pigments in their delicate leaves. When I stopped chattering and looked up, Jean and the girls were grinning.