![]() ![]() ![]() “We think that most important clues are large,” she writes when recalling this first seedling that sparked her curiosity, “but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small.” Her argument is elegantly detailed here alongside a deeply personal memoir, with her story and that of the forest tightly interwoven. ![]() In her new book, Simard contends that at the center of a healthy forest stands a Mother Tree: an old-growth matriarch that acts as a hub of nutrients shared by trees of different ages and species linked together via a vast underground fungal network. Her research has built on the work of past researchers, as well as often overlooked Indigenous knowledge, to show that a forest is not a mere collection of individual trees competing for light and nutrients, but rather a sentient, interacting community. To answer this question and all the other ones that stemmed from it, Suzanne Simard has spent decades with her hands in the soil, designing experiments and piecing together the remarkable mysteries of forest ecology. She wondered why this particular seedling was dying, but nearby ones were not. In 1980, a 20-year-old silviculturalist hunched over a sickly young spruce planted in a clear-cut forest. ![]() FINDING THE MOTHER TREE Discovering Wisdom in the Forest By Suzanne Simard ![]()
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