Finding the Mother Tree

Dr. Suzanne Simard is a forest ecologist whose research changed how the world understands tree communication.

Her groundbreaking book, Finding the Mother Tree, is incredible.

And here's Dr. Simard in 2016 talking about one of her experiments.

So we set about an experiment.

Nobody can be in control in the human mycelium.

There's this beautiful book, Finding the Mother Tree, which is about the mother tree in the forest that controls the human mycelium.

I haven't finished the book yet.

It's fascinating and boring at the same time.

And so the pragmatic reason for the English-speaking or English-language book to exist is that there is so much research on how trees and humans interact, especially in very recent texts like Richard Powers' The Ova Story or Annie Proulx's Barkskins and texts like this, that the unique findings that are present in Making Kin with Trees are focusing on the practices in which especially non-fiction texts engage with the relationship of humans and trees.

If you want to kind of get an idea of the corpus or the text that I'm talking about, it's mostly nonfiction reaching from Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Seymard and Robin Wall Kimra.

And I look at how practitioners and scientists find ways of talking about trees once they have kind of discovered, there's always this kind of discovery scene that the language of their specific profession is not enough to express what trees are due and how we relate to them.

So I look, for example, at the role of reading and the relationship between humans and trees.

But the general public don't know a lot of this stuff.

There was a brilliant book on that concept called Finding the Mother Tree.

And this was all about a logger in Panadar, I believe it was.

She was investigating why they'd chop down these big trees and then they'd plant little ones.

You know, I'm, 'cause I'm curious about... 'Cause I, what you're saying, I also am like, oh, where can you find evidence, and I'm using air quotes, um, evidence of this, like in the natural world or in the 3D world.

And I'm a big fan of Suzanne Simard, who wrote Finding the Mother Tree, and then she has a new book out, When the Forest Breathes, which is wonderful and heartbreaking and everything.

In this march of the trees, because of climate change, the trees are marching to the north in an effort to survive as best they can because it's as a warming planet.

So I'm curious, I kinda think what you're saying with the, how the animals are creating the, the light code, the blueprints and whatnot for going forward is then, 'cause what comes in behind those trees marching to the north, so that feels like that might be part of that h- the healing repopulation work Gaia, how Gaia can heal and survive, which she will.

Um, this...

The title of the book that this is described in is titled Finding the Mother Tree, um, by Suzanne...

I'm forgetting the author's last name right now.

But, um, she described how when you have, uh, uh, up on the Canadian Shield, where you have very challenging and difficult growing conditions, very thin topsoil, when you have a pine tree that releases seedlings...

If people wanna learn more, either about you, your work, Advancing EcoAg, or just, uh, definitely wanna get the name of that book again that you said, uh, The Mother Tree.

Is that it?

Fi- Finding the Mother Tree.

Um, yeah.