Saving the Mother Trees

By Sara WRight

Sixty years ago, scientist Suzanne Simard intuited as a child that the trees, plants, fungi, in the forests she lived in (and that she and her family lightly logged with horses) were all in intimate relationship with one another. It seemed to her that forests were complex interdependent cooperative living organisms. The forests were alive. The blood of the trees was in her bones, she often quipped.
 
As an undergraduate from UBC (University of British Columbia) her first job as a forester seemed daunting. It was up to her to determine why 20 percent or more of the tree seedlings died after the forestry industry stripped huge parcels of land compacting and scraping away the soil. The species chosen was one that would provide foresters with the fastest economical gain. No other trees were allowed to grow in these ‘plantations’ because according to the forest industry other trees and plants competed with the monoculture that had replaced what once was a forest that contained a diversity of trees, plants, mushrooms, and flowers.
 
 Suzanne suspected that there were two problems and one lay underground. She uprooted dying/dead seedlings and peered beneath the surface of the soil. She recalled her childhood when she was continuously digging up masses of colorful rootlets that seemed to be attached to complex underground webs in diverse forests where healthy seedlings flourished.
 
In newly planted strip logged sites the webs of tiny underground rootlets were missing.
 
Suzanne went back to school to become a ground- breaking scientist to prove what the child once intuited. The prestigious scientific journal Nature credited her with the discovery of the ‘Wood Wide Web’ in 1997 which posited the existence and importance of the mycelial network to forest health and regeneration, and by extension to all life.
 
The second intuition that Suzanne addressed and proved was the fact that removing all the other plants and trees like birches from a strip logged site invited in disease. All trees and plants work together to deal with pathogenic fungi, and she demonstrated through years of field work that birches, for example, protected trees if allowed to grow along with the cash crop.
 
Most important is Suzanne’s understanding that some Old Mother/Father Trees must be left in any forest that is logged to help seed future generations. If the ‘Old’ Trees are removed who will be left to pass on the wisdom of the forest?
 
 
 
Dr. Simard demonstrated through years of painstaking field research that all trees and plants are connected underground by way of these vast fungal networks. This fungal web provided seedlings with all the nutrients they needed to survive. Since her initial discoveries Suzanne’s work has been replicated by other scientists over a period of many years, although it is still considered ‘controversial’.
 
Not surprisingly the Forestry Industry did not want to learn that stripping huge tracts of land with giant machines that compacted the soil and destroyed the underlying networks might be an issue to be taken seriously.
 
After Suzanne wrote the story of her discoveries in a compelling memoir “Finding the Mother Tree” a few years ago she established the 100 Year Mother Tree Project where she and her students, many now renowned scientists themselves, continue this meticulous research, most of which is done in the field.
 
Taken directly from the Mother Tree Project’s site:
 
“The Mother Tree Project is a groundbreaking research initiative investigating forest renewal practices that aim to safeguard biodiversity, carbon storage, and forest regeneration as climate changes. The project assesses how seedlings from local, warmer, and colder climates respond to different levels of overstory tree retention, with a focus on seedling survival and growth.
 
Started in 2015 and funded by NSERC and FESBE, the Mother Tree Project is a large scientific, field - based experiment that builds on prior research with the central objective of identifying sustainable harvesting and regeneration treatments that will maintain forest resilience…”
 
Suzanne has incorporated Indigenous scientific scholars as well as well as their stories into her ongoing research.  She was as stunned as I was to learn that Indigenous peoples have known about mycelial networks for millennia. How did they learn, she asked some of her colleagues.
 
The plants told them.
 
In 2023 Professor Simard was the recipient of the prestigious KEW International Medal in recognition of her ongoing research that really is so broad in depth and scope that it’s impossible to condense.
 
I’ll end this essay reiterating key points and adding some practical information, ending with a question that perhaps some will ponder.
 
About 90 percent of all plants have underground symbiotic mycorrhizal (root fungi) relationships with other plant beings that are beneficial. These complex webs  branch and unite and are always on the move just below the surface of the earth creating a living skin that keeps trees, plants, grasses, fungi all connected to each other. Tubular networks keep plant life healthy by providing minerals, carbon, water, minerals etc. to vegetation through the rootlets. What this means practically is that overall plants cooperate with each other. (About ten percent of the fungi are pathogenic and kill trees and plants but this is not the rule).
 
If cooperation has been dominating plant relationships for 400 plus million years and continues to do so today, then how did we get the idea that Nature competes more than S/he cooperates?