A memoir from the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest.
In her new book, Simard contends that at the center of a healthy forest stands a Mother Tree: an old-growth matriarch that acts as a hub of nutrients shared by trees of different ages and species linked together via a vast underground fungal network. Her argument is elegantly detailed here alongside a deeply personal memoir, with her story and that of the forest tightly interwoven ... This book is a testament to Simard’s skill as a science communicator. Her research is clearly defined, the steps of her experiments articulated, her astonishing results explained and the implications laid bare: We ignore the complexity of forests at our peril ... her arguments are buoyed by rigorous, decades-spanning research ... Simard explains in clear language what the implications of these findings are, an important next step often lacking in the work of other scientists who try to share their ideas with a wider public.
A luminous weave of memoir, scientific treatise and Native-inflected meditation ... She limns her tale with rich anecdotes and family lore ... But the science here is equally absorbing. Simard is foremost a student of trees. Early on, she stumbles across a vital linkage between forests and mycorrhizal fungi, and she devotes years of graduate study and creative field experiments to the complex symbiosis between overstory (the uppermost canopy) and understory (the saplings and shrubs below) ... a literary revelation, that botany class you never knew you needed, and certain to be one of this year's most widely discussed books.
... a vivid and inspiring new memoir ... Ms. Simard...shows her prowess as a communicator, something she teaches as well. Even an English major like myself can understand the biology described here ... a combination of personal anecdote and scientific article. For each of Ms. Simard’s discoveries, we get the hypothesis, the experiment and methods, a discussion of results, and a conclusion suggesting where it all might lead. But the author makes it easy by replacing the emotion-purged language of science with something more lyrical, enriching and subjective. There are beautiful paragraphs listing species and their niches ... And there are surprising (and surprisingly apt) analogies ... For Ms. Simard, personal experience leads to revelation, and scientific revelation leads to personal insight. No surprise, then, that she endows trees with human characteristics ... Her portrayals provide the lay reader with an anthropomorphic compass by which to better navigate the biology. But it’s a slippery slope. I chafe when genetic adaptation is called wisdom, or feedback loops are described as intelligence, when maybe it is more accurate to say feedback loops are a model for intelligence. I feel a little crabby complaining about it, but that’s the anthropomorphism conundrum ... In the end, I think the affixing of human traits on plants is justified because Finding the Mother Tree helps make sense of a forest of mysteries.
