By Shantell Powell
Suzanne Simard is the world’s leading forest ecologist, and Finding the Mother Tree is part memoir and part scientific investigation of forests as living organisms. This is her debut book, and it is a New York Times bestseller. It tracks her life growing up in the logging industry of British Columbia and her studies into what makes forests tick.
I grew up in the same forests, and reading this book was of particular interest to me. Simard and I both lived in the same rural and remote areas, so when she describes particular regions, it fills me with corresponding memories. She was a 20-something forestry worker, and I was the pre-teen daughter of a man who worked in the forestry industry. Like her, I travelled all around British Columbia, from the towering rain forests of Vancouver Island to dense evergreens of the high Rockies to the arid pines of the Okanagan Valley. We both lived, worked, and played out in the bush. We both foraged and evaded grizzly bears. When she writes of the desolation of clearcuts, and how they look like battlefields, I too am taken back to these sylvan sites of mass murder, where traditional foods and medicines of Indigenous peoples and animals alike have been stricken from existence. When she writes about spraying glyphosate on healthy forests to kill “weeds,” tears prickle my eyes as forests and habitats die. I find it very easy to empathize with her experiences.
Finding the Mother Tree is also a type of mystery story. Why do some seedlings thrive and others wither away? Do regimented monocultures grow cash crop trees more prodigiously than the messy, hard-to-harvest natural forests? Does killing off competing plants let economically valuable trees grow better? Simard writes of her scientific experimentation done in order to learn how forests thrive. She writes of how plants and fungi have evolved to form symbiotic relationships, how humus and mycorrhizal fungi are vital for forest health, and she does so in an engaging manner. You do not need to have a background in forestry or biology to be swept away by this engaging book.
Forests have an intelligence all their own and co-operate and compete with one another. Like humans, forests learn and adapt, and can recognize their neighbours. Finding the Mother Tree demonstrates the spirituality of scientific investigation and shows that there is more to science than quantitative measurements. Finding the Mother Tree also shows what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated field and is a David and Goliath-type story where she confronts rooms full of foresters to tell them their methodology is deeply flawed.
Finding the Mother Tree will appeal to readers of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
I love this book and will be returning to it again and again.
Thank you, Penguin Random House, for a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.