Some day I hope forest ecologist Suzanne Simard runs into botanist Hope Jahren. These women have a lot in common.

They share an unceasing curiosity and respect for the living world. They sacrificed a lot to become scientists. They experienced the loneliness and frustrations of being female scientists, and they made significant contributions to knowledge, although Simard’s discoveries may ultimately prove to be much, much bigger.

Simard’s scientific revelations include an understanding the role fungi root networks play in helping trees share nutrients under stressful conditions.

Foresters assumed that if you clearcut a forest it can be regenerated well enough by replanting new trees in their stead.

Simard showed why kindred species in forests — like the alder or birch in fir stands — should be left alone. Because trees cooperate even as they compete for light, water, and nutrients.

While Simard’s book is packed with elegant descriptions of the forests and mountain ranges she studies, in “Lab Girl” I think Jahren more keenly assays the mental landscape and why it is so hard to make a difference.

And Jahren is funny where Simard is sober, well, most of the time.

In this book in addition to her science Simard shares her personal evolution as a woman, mother, and to a minor degree as a lover.

Her youth was stained by the volatile marriage of her parents and their ultimate divorce. Her own marriage goes off the rails when her academic ambitions and her husband’s preference to live in the backwoods clash.

In this telling her personal enlightenment is gruesomely hijacked by a painful and frightening bout of breast cancer, culminating in surgery and chemotherapy.

As in her childhood, during this period the forests and to a lesser extent her lab help restore her balance. She loses her brother to a terrible farm accident before she has a chance to reconcile with him after a drunken argument. But nothing prepares her for the disorientation that accompanies the cancer treatments.

I have a few complaints with the book.

Simard sets up a parallels between her own suffering and the plunder of the beautiful BC forests, between the role “mother trees” and the mothering role in her life, and between the sacredness of nature’s family and the family she misses from her childhood. Her children are like her little sprouts.

Can’t fathers be nurturing, too?

I can certainly identify with the sense of loss as we grow older and our families fragment.

She also lets herself be consumed by nostalgia for the good old days when the forests were managed by First Nations. Contemporary paleontology shows that hunter-gatherers were terraformers, too, if not quite as dramatic as our civilization turned out to be.

Simard gives long and lavish descriptions of her forest haunts. Sometimes I wished she’d cool it with the adjectives. I’ve been to forests, too. And sometimes they are just plain monotonous.

The sidebars give this story a messianic and melodramatic tinge. I find the science and the trail of discovery plenty exciting enough.

And I should thank both Simard and Jahren for insisting that I focus more closely on the micro aspects of nature. It is more beautiful and complex than imaginable. ( )

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I didn't find this book as satisfying as I had hoped. Through other popular science texts, I had already become familiar with most of Dr. Simard's groundbreaking and important findings. (What this book does deliver well are detailed descriptions of many of the experiments she conducted to reach them.) Much of the biographical material was handled unevenly, in my opinion. If it's the botanical and ecological science you want, perhaps some other books might serve you better. ( )

Well written. Weaves between her life and her science: the life of trees. Surprisingly successful, just barely goes to treacle-y but not by much. It’s a moving account of the science behind proving life is inexorably connected.

50. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
published: 2021
format: 347-page Kindle ebook
acquired: September 5 read: Sep 5 – Oct 24 time reading: 13:35, 2.3 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: science theme: none
locations: British Colombia and Oregon
about the author: a Canadian scientist who is a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia, born in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia.

A memoir with a lot of real science - with pioneering research tracing nutrient sharing between different and competitive tree species, creating a kind of symbiosis through specialized fungi, and later on how old large “mother” trees support their own young. A theme here is everything is connected and we to manage climate change with this knowledge.

Simard tells in the introduction that she discovered the nature of this fungal connections, which I thought was too bold, except that it's exactly what she did. Her 1990's PhD was published on the cover of Nature magazine, under the headline Wood Wide Web. It was really groundbreaking.

I read this with a new group on Litsy focused on nature writing. Some of the members had discomfort with so much memoir in the book, and with the writing, which was actually very good, feels very honest, but is not a work of literary craft.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this, and I really enjoyed being in this science mindset.

2022
https://www.librarything.com/topic/345047#7966562 ( )

Perfect for natural science enthusiasts and readers of The Hidden Life of Trees by the German author and professional forester Peter Wohlleben. Suzanne Simard, the author of this book and a contributor to The Hidden Life of Trees, is a Canadian professor of forest ecology and the originator of the concept of the ‘wood-wide web’, the fungal and microbial network that connects trees and other plants in the forest to one another. Finding the Mother Tree mixes the science and research behind her discoveries with a personal memoir that includes her views on humankind’s role in the natural ecosystem as a whole. I did find it to be on the dry side but what I learned from it gave me a stronger understanding and appreciation for several related books such as Richard Power’s The Overstory, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and, of course, The Hidden Life of Trees.

My thanks to the publisher and Goodreads Giveaways for a paperback copy to review. ( )