In this riveting excerpt from Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard shares how her experience with parenting, climate change, and the networks at the heart of the forest impacted her journey of self discovery.
The separation from my daughters during the week, though, was tearing me apart; I was spending more time away from them than I ever imagined. I had always been by their side, but now we were separated for days on end, just at a time when they were starting a new life, meeting new friends, and attending a different school—when they needed me the most.
A squirrel’s midden of seeds was piled against a moist log, so I looked up to the tree crowns for traces of the previous year’s cones. Douglas fir makes cones sporadically and in synchrony with the shifts in climate over clusters of years. The seeds are dispersed in summer from yawning cones by wind or gravity, or squirrels or birds, and they germinate in the warm beds of minerals and char and partially decomposed forest floor. Burned mixed seedbeds are especially delicious for germination.
The roots of these little seedlings had been laid down well before I’d plucked them from their foundation. The old trees, rich in living, had shipped the germinants waterborne parcels of carbon and nitrogen, subsidizing the emerging radicals and cotyledons—primordial leaves—with energy and nitrogen and water. The cost of supplying the germinants was imperceptible to the elders because of their wealth—they had plenty.
This forest was like the internet too. But instead of computers linked by wires or radio waves, these trees were connected by mycorrhizal fungi. The forest seemed like a system of centers and satellites, where the old trees were the biggest communication hubs and the smaller ones the less busy nodes, with messages transmitting back and forth through the fungal links.
I scraped the soil with my trowel. Just like the old trees near the creek, those on this crest were decorated with truffles and tubercules—clusters of mycorrhizal roots covered in a fungal rind—and golden fungal strands that ran from them like shooting stars. The trees and fungi here too were in an intimate web. Compared to the trees down below, there were even more connections where the soil was drier and the trees more stressed.
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