Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

Simard emphasizes that a respect for nature can benefit human society. In the introduction, she introduces this theme of Nature and Generosity to prepare the reader for her theories on interspecies connectivity, the healing properties of nature, and trees’ inherent ability to communicate with their neighbors. The passage also foreshadows how trees will repeatedly “save” Simard personally, from helping her overcome her grief and guilt regarding her brother’s death to providing the drug that cures her cancer.

“How had the trees weathered the changing cycles of growth and dormancy, and how did this compare to the joys and hardships my family had endured in a fraction of the time?”

Simard structures her memoir around the connections she finds between her experiences in the forest and her family life. Family and nature are the two cornerstones of her life; in writing this memoir, Simard shows how it is impossible to separate emotional relationships from the environmental context one lives in.

“I often feared I’d been hired into the men’s club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth.”

After her first trip to the clear-cut for the logging company, Simard reflects on the anxiety she feels at being a woman in the forestry field, establishing the theme of Feminism, Scientific Research, and Legacy. She perceives how hard it will be to gain the respect of men in her field and pursues a career in scientific research so that her theory on arboreal interspecies cooperation will be taken seriously.

“What mattered was that loggers once stopped and carefully gauged and evaluated the character of individual trees to be cut.”

Simard compares the reverent way her family treats the forest with the logging industry’s concern for capitalistic gain rather than keeping the forest healthy. Simard’s upbringing gives her a unique perspective on how humans often exploit trees and nature for profit. Although Simard suggests that nature does have much to offer humans, she stresses that humans’ use of nature should mirror the mutualism found in nature itself.

“Places of terrible beauty and layered earth and buried secrets. My childhood was shouting at me: The forest is an integrated whole.”

While demarcating a clear-cut with a colleague that includes several elder trees, Simard struggles to speak up against the unethical logging practices. Her family has long respected the forest as an interdependent ecosystem, yet being a young woman anxious about her perception in the forestry field keeps Simard from sticking up for the trees.

“How to protect the forest while it provided us with wood to build our homes, fibers to make our paper, and medicines to cure our ailments. I wanted to be a new breed of silviculturist who honored this responsibility.”

After hiking with Jean and narrowly escaping a bear attack, Simard’s respect for the forest is reinvigorated. She begins to transition out of her job at the logging company so she can better adhere to her ethics of ecological mindfulness.

“Come to think of it, the lichens and mosses and algae and fungi were also steady as could be, gradually building up the soil, quietly in tandem. Things—and people—working together so that something noticeable could occur.”

Simard’s mother remarks on the obvious cooperation between plant species while on a hike with Simard. This encourages Simard to continue to draw metaphorical parallels between the forest and her family, as well as to give up her job at the logging company to pursue research into mycorrhizal networks and plant cooperation.

“I was in charge of an experiment that required me to kill plants, creating yet another type of displacement. My task suddenly felt contrary to all my aims.”

When Simard begins the weeding experiments for Alan and the Forest Service, she finds herself on a career path that often asks her to sacrifice her ethical beliefs in favor of learning how to properly conduct scientific experiments. During this training period, Simard begins to realize the necessity of speaking out against the Forest Service’s policymakers.

“They’ll want a policy that protects their earnings. Your story has to be convincing.”

Alan advises Simard to confront her fear of public speaking and present the results of her alder and pine experiment to the Forest Service’s policymakers. If Simard is to truly make a difference in how the forest is treated on a national, and global, scale, she must begin by taking a stand against capitalistic tradition.

“We should change our focus from weed-free trees in hopes of short-term growth gains and instead consider what makes the whole forest healthier over the long term.”

Simard’s first conference presentation on the results of her experiment with alders and pines emphasizes her long-view understanding of ecological research. The policymakers, focused on short-term growth, are irritated by her dismissal of their market ambitions.

“It felt like a defining juncture—whether my intuition was right that collaboration in the forest was important to its vitality. And if so, I had a big responsibility to stop the madness of the wholesale removal of native plants.”

Simard conducts her doctoral research on the cooperation between birches and fir using radioactive carbon to trace resource distribution. If the results confirm her hypothesis of interspecies cooperation, she feels she must take a firm stance against the Forest Service’s policymakers and their short-term growth plans.

“I’d discovered that fir gave some carbon back to birch too. As though reciprocity was part of their everyday relationship. The trees were connected, cooperating.”

The major discovery of Simard’s doctoral research is that birch and fir do cooperate with one another and rely on that cooperation for healthy growth. Simard begins speaking out against policymakers with more confidence now that she has definite scientific support for her theory.

“I could never make amends. We would never reconcile. Our final words brutal parting shots in drunken anger and misunderstanding.”

The death of Simard’s brother following a falling-out between the two siblings consumes her with regret and grief. Kelly’s final words were misogynistic and seemed to suggest that Simard’s inability to persuade the policymakers stemmed from her being a woman challenging gender norms. Simard frames the estrangement as fundamentally unnatural; just as trees support one another, she suggests, so too should siblings.

“I threw myself into my research, if only to bury my despair at what I couldn’t repair, trying to find, in my connections to the trees, what I’d lost forever with my brother.”

Simard copes with the loss of her brother Kelly by spending as much time in the forests as possible, whether hiking or skiing. This quote reflects the motif of the connection between Simard’s family and her natural environment, as her experiences within the trees stand in for the feeling of connection she desires to have with her late brother.

“Don’t print this, but between you and me, for all the good the foresters are doing, they might as well paint rocks.”

On the day that Simard’s first daughter is born, a reporter prints this quote from Simard in the Vancouver Sun. This is the first time that Simard has spoken openly against the policymakers in a public forum. Their dislike of the challenge to their authority would lead to her resigning from her position in the Forest Service.

“The awful things I’d heard about women speaking their minds—comments made even in my own family—echoed in me.”

Simard gives a presentation to policymakers on her fir and birch experiments but encounters aggression from a male policymaker. The episode illustrates the double bind she faces professionally, as the outspoken and even domineering demeanor of the man she’s speaking with would not go over well in a woman. Her anxiety over challenging gender norms in this situation is exacerbated by the last, and misogynistic, words that her brother Kelly spoke to her.

“However, as my research program built on success after success toward deciphering the language and intelligence of the forest my marriage did the opposite, the lines of communication starting to fray and snap.”

Simard moves to Vancouver to pursue a professorship. As her husband Don has no intention of living in the city, their marriage becomes strained and characterized by periods of separation as Simard pursues her work. This quote marks one of the few places in Simard’s continued metaphor of the connection between forest and family where the relationship is an inverse one.

“But...it felt like mothering to me. With the elders tending to the young. Yes, that’s it. Mother Trees. Mother Trees connect the forest.”

While on her nine-hour commute between Vancouver and Nelson, Simard begins to conceptualize the idea of a Mother Tree. In her personal life, she is striving to find new lines of communication with her daughters. Instead, she finds hubs of communication in the mycorrhizal network of pines, inspiring her to consider how she might replicate that same kind of connection in her own relationships.

“I knew then that the next step in my pursuit was to find out if trees warned one another of disease or peril, whether the dying species would persist or a different one would take over territory.”

Simard’s research shifts from considering resource distribution through mycorrhizal networks to questioning whether these networks carry messages of warning against infestation, climate change, and other threats. Simard begins considering this new angle just before she is diagnosed with breast cancer, underscoring the connections between her personal life and her work.

“How do mycorrhizal networks affect the regeneration of trees in our changing climate?”

Simard waits for her biopsy results, distracting herself with this new research question connected with her emerging theory of Mother Trees. Alongside the destructive results of clear-cutting, climate change is becoming a serious threat to the regenerative health of forests. Simard hopes to discover that the trees can communicate these dangers to each other through mycorrhizal root systems.

“That health depends on the ability to connect and communicate. This cancer diagnosis was telling me I needed to slow down, grow a backbone, and speak out about what I’d learned from the trees.”

The wisdom that Simard has derived from the forests encourages her to question how resources, nutrients, and final parting warnings are communicated between both mothers and daughters as well as elder trees and seedlings. Simard is now at the point in her career where passing on her discoveries of connectivity is something she feels prepared and supported enough to do.

“'Think of what you want to be, not what you don’t want to be.’ Strong like my trees, I thought, like my maple.”

Simard derives support from both friends and the forest to help her through chemotherapy. Rather than connecting the forest to her family, Simard here connects the forest to her own body, hoping to embody the wisdom she has discovered from a lifetime of connection with the trees.

“I have come full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: Diversity matters. And everything in the universe is connected—between the forests and prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all other creatures.”

Simard returns to the site of her first experiments and confirms that belowground mycorrhizal networks facilitate interspecies cooperation. In noting that her research supports Indigenous understandings of nature, Simard establishes another point of connection—this one between herself and British Columbia’s historical peoples.