Finding the mother tree : Uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest.
By Suzanne Simard.
- 1
- India: Allen Lane (An imprint Penguin Books), c2021.
- i-xi+348P.
Introduction: Connections -- Ghosts in the forest -- Hand fallers -- Parched -- Treed -- Killing soil -- Alder swales -- Bar fight -- Radioactive -- Quid pro quo -- Painting rocks -- Miss Birch -- Nine-hour commute -- Core sampling -- Birthdays -- Passing the wand -- Epilogue: The Mother Tree project.
This is a personal and scientific work on trees, forests, and the author's profound discoveries of tree communication. This is a scientific detective story from the ecologist who first discovered the hidden language of trees. No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard. Now she shares the secrets of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their cooperation, healing capacity, memory, wisdom and sentience. Raised in the forests of British Columbia, where her family has lived for generations, Professor Simard did not set out to be a scientist. She was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest. Though her ground-breaking findings were initially dismissed and even ridiculed, they are now firmly supported by the data. As her remarkable journey shows us, science is not a realm apart from ordinary life, but deeply connected with our humanity. In Finding the Mother Tree, she reveals how the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for our existence - offers profound lessons about resilience and kinship, and must be preserved before it's too late.