By KiddieDaily Editors · 2026-06-29 · 3 min read · 1 source

How ‘Mother Trees’ Nurture Our Forests

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From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood and Jenni Doering with forest scientist Suzanne Simard.

You might remember the name Suzanne Simard from a few years back when she wrote the New York Times bestselling book “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” about her research showing that the biggest and oldest trees in the forest anchor networks of social connection among the trees, and indeed the whole forest ecosystem. It was a breakthrough and not without some controversy to regard trees as having some kind of collective consciousness. Now, Simard is back with her latest book, “When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World,” based in part on her latest research with colleagues including Indigenous communities, that further documents how older trees nurture younger saplings.

Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and works in B.C.’s towering forests, where logging has taken all but 3 percent of the original old-growth trees. She is intent on saving what’s left, and developing more sustainable logging methods to allow old “mother trees” to thrive in those forests, not only helping trees, but also the rest of us. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  JENNI DOERING: What is a mother tree, and why did you give them that name?

SUZANNE SIMARD: What we did in this research, looking at connection in the forest, is we mapped what are called mycorrhizal networks. These are mycelial networks that live below ground. They’re formed by a mycorrhizal fungus, or many mycorrhizal fungi, which are a symbiotic obligate relationship with trees, and actually most plants in the world need these relationships.

These fungi gather food from the trees. In exchange, in this symbiosis, they provide nutrients and water that they gather from the soil, and it turns out that some of these mycelium will connect trees together.  We mapped these mycelial or mycorrhizal networks—I use those things interchangeably—in the soil. What emerged from the map was that the biggest trees were the most highly connected.

Then we started doing a lot of experiments around these old trees and found out that the mycelial network was essential in the regeneration of the trees that were coming up in these old-growth forests, that the young seedlings were tapping into these networks and benefiting from it by getting food and water and nutrients from the big trees. Because of the size, age and regenerative process of these old trees, we started calling them mother trees. STEVE CURWOOD: What drew you to study forests and mother trees?  SIMARD: It came naturally because I grew up in these old forests.

When I was a kid, I just followed my grandfather and grandmother and uncles and aunts through the forest. They were horse loggers, actually, so they made their living from the forest, selectively harvesting small trees from these old-growth forests, so that’s all I knew. 

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