It takes a wood to raise a tree: a memoir

Abstract

By Emma Marris Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Suzanne Simard Knopf (2021) Growing up in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, I often grieved that their beauty - sky-high Douglas firs, rustling alders, sword ferns draped across the slopes - was born of a brutal battle for light, water and nutrients. In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard made the cover of Nature with the discovery of a subterranean lace of tree roots and fungal filaments, or hyphae, in British Columbia (S. Simard et al. Simard got her first morsel of proof for her theory in 1993, while kneeling on the forest floor holding a Geiger counter to detect the radioactive carbon-14 that she used to track carbon flows through plants and fungi.