The Fresh Issue

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 the greater good, she tells herself, as without a body of research to establish her credentials, she cannot get funding to ameliorate the situation. Justification after justification— all of which are convincing —but, ultimately, I find myself with Simard’s sister when she surveys the wasteland they’ve created and cuts through the academic gloss: “Isn’t it obvious looking at this mess that it’s godawful wrong?”

Simard’s early research showed that free-to-grow, bare earth policies do result in quickergrowing Pine trees, which is what the policy makers wanted. However, quick growing does not equal healthier, and over half of the seedlings succumbed to frost, sunburn, rodents, and nitrogen deficiency. Meanwhile, Pines planted alongside Elders grew more slowly, but were healthier. The take home message here— and, indeed, throughout the book —is to slow down, to let things take the time they take. Experiments on how trees grow and tap into the networks around them take years, even decades to show results. But unfortunately, policymakers think short-term and act quickly, causing damage that takes years to reveal itself— and even longer to fix.

Overall, there was a lot I loved about this book— the run-ins with bears; the rookie mistakes as an early career researcher (“What’s that hissing noise?” she asks, as a thousand dollars’ worth of gas seeps out of the canister she’s holding); the frustrations of being a young woman in the aggressively macho world of forestry; grappling with her shyness and fear of confrontation while the men at her lectures talk over, interrupt and belittle her findings. “You can’t hide if you want change,” says her boyfriend, although he’s not the one with an irate forester yelling in his face. At moments, the writing is magical, like the first time Simard uses a Geiger counter to hear evidence that Birch and Fir are communicating underground: Strings and woodwinds, brass and percussion, exploding as one, flooding my ears, the movement allegro and intense, concordant and magical. I was enraptured, focused, immersed, and the breeze sifting through the crowns of my little birches and firs and cedars seemed to lift me clear up. I was part of something much greater than myself.

Other parts of the memoir, however, I found less compelling. Characters flit in and out without much depth but with superfluous detail. Sometimes I could see the relevance of anecdotes— fractured relationships mirroring the fundamental questions of her research: if connection is so important, why is it so fragile and hard to maintain? —but I wasn’t wholly convinced by the execution. I found myself skimming large passages to get back into the forest; I could have done with more science and less life story, more research and less reminiscence, more trees and fewer people.

But on balance, the book works. It’s sad and celebratory, angry and curious. My main reservation is that it seems to be trying to be two books at once. In the end, it’s not quite emotionally engaging enough for a memoir, and not quite focused enough for a popular science book. The writing sometimes lumbers, and the pacing is slow, making an already rather long book feel longer. I confess I still have the last hundred pages to read— and I’m not rushing to get to them. It’s interesting enough that I want to finish it, but not gripping enough to get excited about. Fundamentally, I’m more excited about the book’s overall message than the book itself. This wisdom applies far beyond the forest: ‘interactions over resources isn’t a winner takes all thing; it’s about give-and-take, building more from a little and finding balance over the long term’.

Finding the Mother Tree has seeded many thoughts, but the book itself could have used just a little pruning.