viii: Book Club
Finding the Mother Tree (Simard, S.: Allen Lane, 2021) Reviewer: Ella Leith Suzanne Simard is the world’s leading forest ecologist, famous for her research into the Wood Wide Web— the subterranean network of fungal associates through which trees connect and communicate. I came across her in Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and was excited to read more about her life and research. Finding the Mother Tree is more about the former than the latter; it’s fundamentally a memoir of a life of research, full of scientific observations and nature writing. The memoir element worked best in the early chapters— we learn along with Simard, standing at her shoulder as she digs ectomycorrhizal root tips out of the humus and begins to realise their significance; we sit with her all night on a mattress on the floor as she studies. We, too, learn how: Colonization of plants with fungi enabled them to acquire sufficient nutrients from the barren, inhospitable rock to gain a toehold and survive on land ... suggesting that co-operation was essential to evolution. Working in the logging industry, Simard begins to question the received wisdom that trees compete rather than cooperate, and starts to explore how trees of the same and different species interact and share nutrients, water, and information. Learning alongside the young Simard makes the science accessible; as someone who dropped biology as soon as I could, I was relieved to find it all pretty straightforward to follow. An excellent early chapter gives an account of the Simard family’s logging heritage, providing a usefully stark comparison to the industrial logging world in which Simard later finds herself. We watch her wrestle with her complicity in the Canadian Forest Service’s destructive free-to-grow policy— under which only commercial Pine trees were free to grow, while foresters ‘waged all-out war on native
plants and broadleaf trees’. Simard longs to prove that free-to-grow is not effective, that ‘conifer seedlings needed to connect to the mycorrhizal fungi in soil to survive ... [and] native plants helped them make those connections.’ But, to do this, she must undertake rigorous and replicable field experiments into the effects of spraying swathes of forest with herbicides to ‘bare earth’ it ahead of planting Pine seedlings. It’s deeply frustrating to read— and it’s meant to be. Simard gives us an uncomfortable insight into the central conundrum of her research: to disprove the efficacy of deeply damaging practices, Simard must herself be complicit in the destruction of vast and intricate ecosystems. ‘I’d designed my first experiment!’ she crows, before adding: ‘I loathed its purpose, which I was sure was the opposite of what we should be doing.’ It’s for
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