Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Simard goes hiking with Mary, a friend she knew while living with Don in Corvallis. Simard and Mary began a relationship following Simard’s divorce. As the two hike, Simard explains the worrying spread of beetle infestations killing large swathes of trees and her new research working with Dr. Yuan Yuan Song: They are testing whether infected firs might warn neighboring trees through mycorrhizal networks. Simar plans to continue this research and has premiered a short documentary film Mother Trees Connect the Forest. 

A week later, Simard stops while driving to core a Mother Tree that has died from budworm infestation. The seedlings around the tree survive, indicating to Simard that the Mother Tree might have sent the last of its water and resources through its roots to the seedlings.

Simard has a biopsy performed on her left breast after noticing a lump. She spends days worrying over the results; both she and Don agree that they won’t tell Hannah or Nava until cancer is confirmed. Simard spends more time hiking with Mary, teaches courses at the university, and organizes her graduate students around her new main research question: “How do mycorrhizal networks affect the regeneration of trees in our changing climate?” (249). She receives the results of her experiment with Yuan Yuan, confirming that pines connected to dying firs through mycorrhizal networks received the last of the dying trees’ water and resources.

These preliminary results allow Simard to expand her research question to consider whether trees warn each other of changing climate patterns, resulting in migration northward to colder climates. Two weeks after her biopsy, Simard learns that she has breast cancer.

Simard is scheduled for a mastectomy. She continues to publish on her Mother Tree theory; her research is positively received and begins to change prevailing attitudes toward the forest. The next step is to determine whether Mother Trees can detect which seedlings around them are their kin. Her graduate students perform experiments on this topic, concluding that Mother Trees do recognize their kin and funnel resources to them over seedlings sprouted from other trees.

Mary spends more time in Nelson with Simard, where Simard has purchased a house to be near her daughters. She regrets not having done it sooner, as Don wanted, as well as the years spent handling Roundup and other contaminants for her experiments. Simard attends workshops on cancer survival that emphasize the importance of maintaining open lines of communication and connection with family and friends. After her mastectomy, Simard’s doctors discover that the cancer has spread to her lymph nodes. She begins a course of chemotherapy.

Simard finds refuge in the forest as she loses her hair, strength, and willpower. She joins a support group for women with breast cancer and leans on their advice. She confers with her graduate students over Skype on the Mother Tree experiments. Even dying Mother Trees send resources to their seedlings, prompting Simard to realize that “[t]he dying still have much to give” (271). Simard begins receiving paclitaxel infusions, a drug derived from the yew tree. Simard is invited to speak at a TED Talk in two years about her Mother Tree research. The paclitaxel infusions are successful; Simard is declared cancer free, though warned by her doctor that if the cancer returns she will not survive.

Simard returns to Adams Lake, the site of her first experiments on clear-cutting in 1993. She is there with her two daughters, Jean, and her niece. She observes that root connection is essential to tree health and growth; moreover, the pines and firs exist in a reciprocal relationship. She explains her theories of Mother Trees, diversity, and cooperation to the teenage girls. Despite her findings, Simard finds it difficult to publish papers on “the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem” because there are no experimental controls (283). Simard is still working on experiments to distinguish whether Mother Trees flood their seedlings with resources upon their death. Since her illness, this concept has been significant for her, as she desires to give something to her daughters.

Between TED Talks, publications in National Geographic, podcasts with Radiolab, and the concept of the Mother Tree forming the central theme of the 2009 film Avatar, Simard’s research is finally being recognized for its potential to positively impact humans’ relationship with the natural world. Simard’s current research emphasizes the cooperative nature of large ecosystems and argues against industrial and cultural practices that exacerbate climate change’s effects on forests. She completes this research with several teams of scientists but has begun including Hannah in her field expeditions, hoping to teach her daughter about the healing, connective energy to be found among the trees.

Simard describes her ongoing Mother Tree project, begun in 2015. She has nine experimental forests throughout British Columbia that she uses to collect data on “how webs of relationships play out in real environments and change with forest-cutting patterns” (304). She furthers an emerging philosophy of “complexity science” that foregrounds cooperation. Simard hopes that this project will help her global audience to realize that humans have the power to change the course of our relationship with the natural world.