Why this book: I had read  the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers,  the 2019 Pulitzer prize for fiction winner, and was very intrigued by a character in the book who had explored the connections between trees and within forests, who had been ostracized and viewed as a crank – until her ideas were validated.  That character was based on Suzanne Simard. When I saw that she’d written her own book telling her story, I was intrigued and chose to read it. 

Summary in 3 Sentences: This a combination personal memoir and a recent history of how forest ecology has come to accept that trees are connected communities and communicate with each other in ways previously unknown to biologists.  Suzanne Simard shares her life story, intermingling major events in her personal life with discoveries her professional research has made into the many ways in which trees and plants communicate and share resources with each other.  As the data from her research picks up momentum, she struggles to gain acceptance of her ideas in traditional forestry, and all along, she shares the struggles and joys she experiences in her personal life – a wonderful combination ground-breaking biological insights and personal memoir. 

My Impressions:   Loved this book.  I really liked the woman Suzanne Simard as she presents herself in this memoir – a shy, humble, very dedicated scientist, also a hardy backwoods woman who is comfortable in tough environments, having spent much of her life hiking in the mountains and rain forests of British Colombia.    Her ideas in which she believed passionately, were rejected by traditionalists in the very powerful forestry lobby in Canada, but though it was painful and frustrating, she kept at it, and over time has won great respect, not only for her ideas but for her persistence in advocating for them, and has won redemption as her theories have proven correct.   Suzanne Simard is open in sharing her life with us the readers, while also using her story to educate us about her amazing insights about the life and community of trees, and plants, and fungi that populate our forests.  

She grew up in a small rural town in the mountains and forests of British Colombia, the daughter of loggers and foresters, and cowboys.  In the first couple of chapters we learn something of what it was like to grow up in that small idyllic town surrounded by close family, forests, rivers, and mountains and how she developed her interest in and love for the forests. As she reached adulthood she was happy  and felt privileged to get a job in the powerful and well regarded Forestry service. 

Along the way she shares the pain she and her siblings experienced when their parents divorces.  She painfully recounts an inebriated argument she had with her beloved brother, a cowboy rodeo-rider.  She felt the silly argument was her fault, but before she could get around to reconciling with him, he is killed in an accident.  (She shares a fascinating story of his premonition of his own death. (p162)  Page numbers refer to Knopf Hardcover published 2021)   

As a young adult and researcher for the Canadian forest service, she begins to get insights into how trees and plants interact that became the theory that then became her life’s work – to better understand the “community” and ecology of the forest, as well as to change forestry policies and practices based on a new and different understanding about how trees grow, support each other and thrive. Traditional forestry was based on the theory that trees competed with each other for light, water, nutrients.  Simard’s theories stood that idea on its head, claiming that trees in the forests she was studying actually cooperate and support each other.  “Roots didn’t thrive when they grew alone.  The trees needed one another.”  p161

She eventually chose to leave the Forest Service (she assumed she would be fired for her unorthodox ideas) and pursued a PhD at Oregon State in Corvallis, which opened doors to research grants and other opportunities to explore her passion.  She shares how she met and fell in love with her husband,  another biological researcher, they married, had two daughters, and moved back to Canada where they began raising a family, and continued her research, but now also as a wife and a mother.  

Then as her career took off,  she chose to accept a position as an associate professor at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, but after a couple of years, city life did not agree with her husband, and the family eventually chose to return to their small town home near Nelson BC, a nearly 9 hour drive from Vancouver.   Suzanne stayed on in her position, and her weekly commutes from Vancouver put great strain on her energy, and on her marriage and family.  She describes how she coped, until the struggles to align her and her husband’s careers, and their conflicting lifestyle desires finally ended their marriage.   She eventually developed a close friendship with a woman friend who helped her cope and deal with the the challenges of now being a single mother,  as her research continued to uncover new truths about the community of plants and trees in the forest.

She found that different fungi support different kinds of plants and trees. They might appear to some to be parasites, but actually are symbiotic helpers, helping trees to share nitrogen, carbon, water and other nutrients. There are a hundred or more species of fungi that support trees in the forest,

“About half (of the fungi) were generalists, colonizing both paper birch and Douglas fir in a diverse network. An intricately woven rug.  The other half were specialists, with fidelity to either birch or fir, but not both….  Some were good at acquiring phosphorus from humus, others nitrogen from aging wood. some sopped up water from deep in the soil, others from shallow layers. Some were active in spring, others in fall …Some produced energy-rich exudates that fueled bacteria performing other jobs, while other fungi produced fewer exudates because their jobs required less energy.” p168

Trees seemed to have a reciprocity arrangement, in which during windows when one species or tree had an abundance of life-nurturing carbon, nitrogen, water, or other key nutrients,  it would share with other surrounding trees, and when those trees were doing well, they would give back.  “This trading system between the two species  (birch and Douglas fir,)  shifting with the seasons, suggested that the trees were in a sophisticated exchange pattern, possibly reaching a balance over the course of a year. “ p175

Also she found that “Mother Trees” were most generous with their own seedlings, though they shared with other species and trees as well.   In older trees, she found what seemed an almost intentional speeding up of sharing of nutrients before they died, as though gifting to their progeny resources they wouldn’t need anymore. And when the older trees died, their roots and rotting trunks and branches sustained the same trees they had supported in life – including and especially their own seedlings. 

“Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans.  They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care.  But now we know Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring.  Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhizas (fungi) of their kin, but to other members of the community.  To help keep it whole.   They appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters.  Conveying their life energy, their wisdom, to carry life forward.” p 277

She shares many stories of going into the forests to explore the intricate functions of different trees and ecological systems in the forest, walking, often alone, near-miss encounters with bears, and other hazards of the forest – but she was at home in this world.  She spent time with native Americans who have lived in harmony with the forest for millennia;  their wisdom helped inform her work and they gave her the term “Mother Tree,”  since they had long before seen the special relationship that exist between trees in the forest.   

Later she shares how she developed breast cancer, learned that it had already metastasized, and the brutal treatment she underwent to be able to survive.  She assumed that her early extensive exposure to Roundup with he Forest Service to kill weeds around seedlings, as well as her academic work with radioactive carbon isotopes to track movement of nutrients in plants likely contributed to her cancer.  She was able to survive and continue her work with the support of her woman friend, her ex-husband, other friends and family, and  her daughters.  She realized that she survived with a support network similar to the type of community support that trees in the forest offer each other to survive the various traumas and challenges she describes in her book.

The book concludes on a positive note as she and her teenage daughters continue  their research walking in the woods and exploring different ways trees and plants, and fungi, and environmental conditions interact.  The hard-cover book includes impressive color photos of different trees and fungi that she describes in the book, as well as black-and-white pictures of Suzanne with her family engaged in the more personal dimensions of her story.  

I found her story fascinating, and I really liked the humble and honest and passionate woman who told it.   More is available at http://mothertreeproject.org as well as various Ted Talks and interviews with Suzanne Simard on Youtube. Two final quotes probably sum up her insights pretty well:

“Ecosystems are so similar to human societies – they’re built on relationships.  The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.”(p189) 

“Scientists now are more willing to say that forests are complex adaptive systems, comprised of many species that adjust and learn, that include legacies such as old trees and seed banks and logs, and these parts interact in intricate dynamic networks, with information feedbacks and self-organization. Systems-level properties emerge from this that add up to more than the sum of the parts.” (p300)

For another perspective on Finding the Mother Tree, read a great review by Eugenia Bone from the WSJ in 2021, which you can find here