Groundbreaking forest research inspires insights more complex than Darwin’s and more subtle than Dawkins’
Finding the Mother Tree
SUZANNE SIMARD
(ALLEN LANE, 368 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
Suzanne Simard loves trees. She also murders them. During 35 years of experiments as a forest ecologist in Canada, she has ripped trees up at the roots, sprayed them with weedkiller, cut off their foliage and doused them with radioactive gases. All in a good cause, though: her results are, literally, groundbreaking.
In the mid 1980s Simard, now 60, began exploring the then little-understood relationship between forests and ectomycorrhizal fungi, delicate underground threads that weave through soil, wrapping themselves around and between roots, connecting one tree to another.
Her experiments have proved that trees not only use this subterranean network to share nutrients across and between species, but also to share information, “warning” each other of potential threats. It was Simard who first described the forest as a form of huge neural network, and who figured out that older individuals – “Mother Trees” – actively nurture their young, acting as crucial repositories of nutrition and knowledge that help the next generation adapt.
