logo

42 pages 1 hour read

Suzanne Simard

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Key Figures

Suzanne Simard

Born in 1960, Simard is a scientist and professor currently working in the department of forest conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia. She grew up in the Monashee Mountain range of British Columbia and received her doctorate in forest sciences at Oregon State University. Her research into mycorrhizal networks and interspecies cooperation led to her recognition of Mother Trees, now a well-regarded concept in ecological studies, which funnel resources and warning signals to their seedlings through their mycorrhizal root network.

Simard’s memoir charts the parallel tracks of her career and personal life, beginning with her curiosity about how the forest heals itself and whether it is a social ecosystem. The skepticism with which the scientific community initially met Simard’s theories about Nature and Generosity echo its skepticism of Simard herself as a woman in a traditionally male profession. Particularly in Simard’s early career, the struggle to be taken seriously sometimes forced Simard to compromise her own ethics—e.g., by supporting herbicide techniques to gain necessary research experience. To make strides in professional, academic, and scientific communities, Simard also had to overcome her fear of public speaking and her reservations about failing to meet gendered expectations.

In keeping with her emphasis on Feminism, Scientific Research, and Legacy, Simard highlights two major turning points in her career that were distinctly female: the birth of her first daughter, Hannah, and Simard’s diagnosis with breast cancer. The experience of motherhood lent Simard additional confidence while deepening her appreciation of nature. Consequently, she began giving more public interviews and speaking at conferences, slowly changing the perception of women in ecological and forestry studies. Her experiences with breast cancer encouraged her to further challenge the status quo, leading to her concept of the Mother Tree.

Suzanne Simard’s Family

Considering that Simard bases her research on the interconnected family nature of the forest, her own family features prominently in this memoir. Simard’s brother, Kelly, particularly influences her understanding of connecting to the forest. He died in an accident shortly before his wife gave birth to Simard’s niece—a loss made worse by the fact that Simard and Kelly had argued before his death and never reconciled. In her grief, Simard became more focused on nature as a healing modality, often going into the forest to experience a sense of connection that she could no longer experience with Kelly. As Simard and Kelly’s estrangement had stemmed from disagreements about gender roles, its unresolved nature also touched on a particular sore spot for Simard. Simard not only voices her own regret about their final argument but suggests that her brother would likely have regretted it too; she notes that he was “winding down from a long week on horseback” when he made his insensitive remarks (139), implying that he might not even have truly meant them but was rather putting on an air of machismo. Simard’s response to his death—immersing herself in nature’s nurturing environment—suggests an attempt to heal both her own guilt and her brother’s.

Simard often involved other family members as research assistants for her early experiments, as they had worked with the forest for generations and knew it as intimately as she did. Her mother, an elementary school teacher characterized by a straightforward and dedicated nature, is the person Simard depicts herself turning to for advice on major life decisions. Simard’s mother encouraged her to find a job outside of the logging industry and to pursue a professorship over a decade later; she also supported Simard through her chemotherapy. Her role throughout the memoir foreshadows the Mother Trees that dominate the work’s final chapters and echoes the emphasis Simard places on her own experiences of motherhood. According to Simard, the role of mothers—plant or animal—is to entrust a legacy to their children: “[Mother Trees] appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters. Conveying their life energy, their wisdom, to carry life forward” (277). The memoir ends shortly after Simard’s eldest daughter announces her interest in forest ecology, suggesting that Simard has succeeded in this role.

Forest Services Policymakers

As governmental representatives, the policymakers associated with Canada’s Forest Services historically aligned their practices with capitalistic ideology, preferring to introduce herbicide, clear-cutting, and other harmful practices in order to maximize present-day profits. When Simard began her academic and scientific career, these policymakers were her primary opponents. They distrusted her long-view theories, her support of ecological wholeness over consumerist profit, and the way she conducted her research. Simard spent decades conducting research to persuade the policymakers away from the status quo; she succeeded when her theory of Mother Trees and interspecies cooperation became public knowledge.

Simard’s depiction of these policymakers as largely male reflects historical reality, but it also illustrates her point about the overlapping challenges she faced as a woman putting forth a “feminine” view of nature’s workings. The hostility she experienced while presenting her findings on the relationship between birch and fir trees encapsulates this:

“Well, Miss Birch,” [Rick] said, “you think you’re an expert?”
I’d heard this name whispered behind my back. Birch was the clever substitute in public for what some of them called me in private.
Then he became furious. “You have no idea how these forests work!”
My baby stirred for the first time, and I felt faint.
“You’re naïve to think we’re going to leave these weeds out here to kill the trees!” he roared (206).

Policymakers like Rick resisted the notion that birch might be beneficial for a variety of reasons, ranging from conventional wisdom about competition between plants to the unprofitability of birch. However, the intersection with misogyny is clear in the nickname these policymakers used for Simard. The episode also exemplifies the broader gender dynamics that challenged Simard throughout her career, from the unique difficulties of working while pregnant to the aggressive behavior of male coworkers to her own tendency to defer rather than argue.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text