Memoir Monday and Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

 

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard... The world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

In this, her first book, now available in paperback, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

And Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world.

I find trees and their behaviors fascinating! To some, trees are just tall objects that occupy our lawns and our forests, giving us shade and apples. But trees have so much more to them. The way they live and help eachother is something of much research. Not since The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, have I found a book that really pulled me in about this topic. Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is getting all the buzz these days too. Here is a link to one of her TED talks. Published last year by Knopf and widely available. It's on my nightstand...