through movies such as “Avatar,” books like Peter Wohlleben’s “Te Hidden Life of Trees” and the mycologist Paul Stamets’s TED talk, “Six Ways Tat Mushrooms Can Save the World,” which has been viewed almost 10 million times. What all of these ideas have in common is research conducted by a shy Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard, whose doctoral thesis changed the way we understand the woods. It has long been established that


plants trade some of the sugar they make for micronutrients foraged in the soil by fungi, and there had already been some research done that showed the link between fungi and trees. Dr. Suzanne Simard’s study discovered that fungi in fact attach to the roots of multiple trees of different species, creating pipelines by which a forest community might share nutrients and other molecules and thereby “challenge the prevailing theory that cooperation is of lesser importance than competition in evolution and ecology.” Dr. Simard and her colleagues proved


their theory with a simple, well-crafted field experiment: She labeled tree sugars with radioactive isotopes and then tracked them as they traveled through fungal tubes and into the root tips of other trees. Her paper was published in 1997 in the journal Nature and made the cover, beating out the discovery of the fruit-fly genome (more important than it sounds). Te editors of Nature called it “the wood-wide web” and today it is shorthand for more than the communication networks of trees and their fungi in a given ecosystem: It has become what Richard Powers calls “the gospel of new forestry” (the character of Patricia Westerford in his novel “Te Overstory” is based on Dr. Simard) and a metaphor for cooperation as a means to success and happiness. Dr. Simard tells this story, and the


story of her many other surprising discoveries (I stopped counting her scholarly papers at 150) in a vivid and inspiring new memoir, “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.” Portraying herself here as earnest, hardworking and a sweet-natured cornball, Dr. Simard recounts how she started her career as a researcher at the British Columbia Ministry of Forests. Te ministry employed a free-to-grow policy for their pine plantations that eliminated those plants that competed with the


young trees for sun and water, like weeding on a forest scale. Yet the pine seedlings failed to thrive. Dr. Simard’s intuition was that the “weed” plants were somehow necessary for the well-being of the seedlings. Exploring that hunch has been her life’s work. Over the years, Dr. Simard


encountered no shortage of pushback. Government bureaucrats were reluctant to spend money on her recommendations. Her managers resisted changing their forestry models and perhaps “couldn’t listen to women,” labeling her a “troublemaker.” Fellow scientists challenged her research methods. Tis last may have originated in envy, but ultimately is an important part of the scientific process—after all, without stringent vetting, we might still believe that Vulcan is, indeed, a planet. Today Dr. Simard’s research is widely accepted. We now know that through fungal networks trees share resources, that mature trees (what she calls “hub trees” in her research, and “mother trees” when speaking to popular audiences) support seedlings, favor their kin and distribute resources, even in death. It’s a radical new understanding of plants. Today, Dr. Simard is a professor of


forestry at the University of British Columbia, where she no doubt influences a generation of ecologists. In her TED talks, documentaries and now this book, she shows her prowess as a communicator, something she teaches as well. Even an English major like myself can understand the biology described here. For each of Dr. Simard’s discoveries,


we get the hypothesis, the experiment and methods, a discussion of results, and a conclusion suggesting where it all might lead. But the author makes it easy by replacing the emotion-purged language of science with something more lyrical, enriching and subjective. Tere are beautiful paragraphs listing species and their niches: “A collection of maidenhair ferns, with their delicate black stems, grew from a patch of humus at the base of a rock wall covered in a cascade of licorice ferns . . . and tiny oak ferns covered the rises in the shadow of the trees.” And there are surprising (and surprisingly apt) analogies, as when she compares the hub-and-node system of old and young trees interconnected by mycorrhizal fungi to neural cells and pathways. She describes the elation when new


ideas strike, the deliberate tedium of experiments and the rush when results allow for a peek under nature’s skirt, often expressed in italics and the French of her Canadian family: Mon dieu! Bien sûr! Saint chats! In summarizing her conclusions, she compares the secret lives of trees with her own. Motherhood inspires her to wonder if trees favor their related seedlings in the allotment of carbon. Her frustration about gender stereotypes leads her to question whether competition really outranks cooperation as a motor of evolution. And her battle with cancer leads her to speculate if deceased trees bequeath carbon to their kin before other trees in their fungal network, like leaving money to the kids first, with whatever is left donated to the local public radio station. For Dr. Simard, personal experience leads to revelation, and scientific revelation leads to personal insight. No surprise, then, that she endows


trees with human characteristics: Mother trees nurture their young, pass their wisdom and help one another through distress and sickness. Her portrayals provide the lay reader with an anthropomorphic compass by which to better navigate the biology. But it’s a slippery slope. I chafe when genetic adaptation is called wisdom, or feedback loops are described as intelligence, when maybe it is more accurate to say feedback loops are a model for intelligence. I feel a little crabby complaining about it, but that’s the anthropomorphism conundrum: On the one hand it helps people appreciate nature and get excited about its preservation; on the other, it keeps us stuck in an anthropocentric point of view. In the end, I think the affixing of


human traits on plants is justified because “Finding the Mother Tree” helps make sense of a forest of mysteries. It might even persuade you that organisms other than ourselves—even fungi—have agency. Dr. Simard hasn’t so much written a “How I Came Up With the Big Idea” book as she has a book about what makes an idea big. –Eugenia Bone


Ms. Bone is the author of Mycophilia


as well as Microbia: A Journey Into the Unseen World Around You and the editor of Fantastic Fungi: Te Community Cookbook, out in October. Tis review was originally published in the Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2021, and used here with permission of the author.


Fall 2021 FUNGI Volume 14:4 69


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