Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

A compelling, very personal journey of discovery from the world's foremost forest ecologist, who altered people's perceptions of trees and their relationships to other living creatures in the forest forever.

Suzanne Simard, a scientist who has been compared to Rachel Carson and praised for her ability to communicate complex, technical ideas in a compelling and meaningful manner, is a trailblazer in the field of plant communication and intelligence. Filmmakers have been impacted by her work (see James Cameron's Avatar's Tree of Souls), and over 10 million people have watched her TED lectures globally.

Now, in her debut book, Simard immerses us in her world, the private world of the trees, illuminating the important and fascinating truths that trees are more than just a source of pulp or wood; rather, they are a complex, interdependent circle of life; and that forests are cooperative, social creatures connected by underground networks that allow trees to share their vulnerabilities and vitality with communal lives not all that dissimilar from our own.

The Mother Trees, the enigmatic and potent forces that connect and sustain the others around them, are at the center of it all. Simard describes in inspiring, illuminating, and approachable ways how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; how they elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies.

Simard describes how she was brought up in a world of logging in the British Columbian rainforests. She describes how she cataloged the trees in the forest as a youngster and eventually learned to love and appreciate them, setting out on a difficult but rewarding journey of self-discovery. In addition, she shares personal accounts of her journey along the way—of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward—helping us to understand how human scientific inquiry goes beyond data and technology to truly understand ourselves and our place in the world. Through her writing about her own life, we also learn about the Mother Tree's true connection to the forest, which is nurtured in the same profound ways that human societies and families do, and how these unbreakable bonds allow all of us to survive.