Finding the Mother Tree

No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard. Now she shares the secrets of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their cooperation, healing capacity, memory, wisdom and sentience.Raised in the forests of British Columbia, Simard was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest.Though her ground-breaking findings were initially dismissed and even ridiculed, they are now firmly supported by the data. As her remarkable journey shows us, science is not a realm apart from ordinary life, but deeply connected with our humanity.In Finding the Mother Tree, she reveals how the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for our existence - offers profound lessons about resilience and kinship, and must be preserved before it's too late.

A scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series... Just as she disinters earthy mushrooms and the finest of filaments, so she lays bare the human heart with moving simplicity... It is her gallant mission in the book and in her life - and one essential to combating the climate crisis - to make science more humanly engaged, Finding the Mother Tree is the kind of story we need to be telling, a new way of communicating that the world desperately needs to hear... A reminder to listen to our wilder selves, and to remember, with humility, how little we know of the complexities of the natural world, 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, A masterwork of planetary significance, [Simard] is an intellectual force... Simard's results are so revolutionary and controversial that they have quickly worked their way into social theory, urban planning, culture and art... We have a lot of rethinking to do about the economic and political models that, since Darwin, have been taken to be natural

Dr. Suzanne Simard was raised in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia. She is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry, and has earned a global reputation for her research on tree connectivity and communication and its impact on the health and biodiversity of forests.