Book Review: Finding the Mother Tree

Suzanne Simard, a professor at the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry, is a trailblazer in forest ecology whose dedicated journey led her to go below the woodland surface to get to the root of what makes a tree thrive. Her answer: other trees… and plants… and fungus. Simard's research uncovered a vast underground root system that links forest communities into a network, shares information and resources through chemical signals, and, ultimately, creates a collective beneficial symbiotic relationship. Her interpretation: forests are social communities that are "perceiving, communicating and responding to one another." In other words, forests are connected.

For years, Simard’s discoveries have inspired many notable works, such as the widely popular 2009 film Avatar, the New York Times bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction novel The Overstory. In her first book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, published in 2021 by Alfred A. Knopf, Simard uses the scientific memoir form to creatively tell her life story as it revolved around her years of careful observation, innovative research, controversial interpretations, and persuasive voice for change. The result: she has created a piece of science-centered non-fiction that, because it is presented through the lens of relatable human experience, is accessible, interesting, and inspiring to any type of reader.

From the first page of Chapter I, Simard invites us to join her on her journey, and we fall in step with her as she travels on her path of ups and downs, failures and successes. We learn about her youth, meet her family and realize that her love of trees and the forest began during her childhood summers spent in the lush forest landscape of British Columbia. We are with her at her first job in the logging industry, where she sees the "whole forest suffering" and comes to understand why she then "poured everything [she] had into becoming a sleuth of what it takes to heal the natural world."

As she shares the stories behind the research, we become like her research assistant learning the intricacies of her scientific method, field research, and result presentation. We are there when she discovers the staggering evidence for the Mother Trees that "pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape." We hear her gasp as she concludes that the forest itself, with the Mother Trees in its center, has all the wisdom it needs to heal.

Armed with her groundbreaking findings, Simard will continue to work tirelessly to promote forest education, conservation, and mindful resource management practices. She introduces her latest and biggest experiment in the Epilogue: The Mother Tree Project. She invites the reader to join the movement to retain Mother Trees. Like her ongoing research, where a new study begins at the conclusion of the previous study, Simard ends this book's story with the hope of beginning a new story: your story about how you become connected with The Mother Tree Project. So, as Simard suggests, I encourage you to read this book and then, "Go find a tree - your tree."