Suzanne Simard > Quotes

“Such a marvel, the tenacity of the buds to surge with life every spring, to greet the lengthening days and warming weather with exuberance, no matter what hardships were brought by winter.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“Plants are attuned to one another's strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from that of my own culture. It speaks of being attuned to the blooming of the bitterroot, the running of the salmon, the cycles of the moon. Of knowing that we are tied to the land—the trees and animals and soil and water—and to one another, and that we have a responsibility to care for these connections and resources, ensuring the sustainability of these ecosystems for future generations and to honor those who came before. Of treading lightly, taking only what gifts we need, and giving back. Of showing humility toward and tolerance for all we are connected to in this circle of life. But what my years in the forestry profession have also shown me is that too many decision-makers dismiss this way of viewing nature and rely only on select parts of science. The impact has become too devastating to ignore. We can compare the condition of the land where it has been torn apart, each resource treated in isolation from the rest, to where it has been cared for according to the Secwepemc principal of k̓wseltktnews (translated as “we are all related”) or the Salish concept of nə́c̓aʔmat ct (“we are one”). We must heed the answers we’re being given.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.

The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out. Making this transformation requires that humans recommect with nature -- the forests, the prairie, the oceans -- instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“There is no moment too small in the world. Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose, and everything is in need of care. This is my creed. Let us embrace it. We can watch it rise. Just like that, at any time—all the time—wealth and grace will soar.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“How had the trees weathered the changing cycles of growth and dormancy, and how did this compare to the joys and hardships my family had endured in a fraction of the time?”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“Studies show time and again that cooperation is commonly chosen in groups, even when betrayal of others could lead to a better individual reward.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest

“Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system. And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, and we can learn from experience. A system is ever changing because its parts—the trees and fungi and people—are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The trees soon revealed startling secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied. I conducted hundreds of experiments, with one discovery leading to the next, and through this quest I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication, of the relationships that create a forest society. The evidence was at first highly controversial, but the science is now known to be rigorous, peer-reviewed, and widely published. It is no fairy tale, no flight of fancy, no magical unicorn, and no fiction in a Hollywood movie.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“We have the power to shift course. It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse. By understanding their sentient qualities, our empathy and love for trees, plants, and forests will naturally deepen and find innovative solutions. Turning to the intelligence of nature itself is the key. It’s up to each and every one of us. Connect with plants you can call your own.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“We chattered about the implications for farms: if legumes passed nitrogen to corn, for instance, we could mix crops and stop having to pollute the soil with fertilizers and herbicides.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.

The rest of the planted has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“I was born to the wild. I come from the wild. I can’t tell if my blood is in the trees or if the trees are in my blood.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The forest itself is part of much larger cycles, the building of soil and migration of species and circulation of oceans. The source of clean air and pure water and good food. There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature—its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The mushroom is the visible tip of something deep and elaborate, like a thick lace tablecloth knitted into the forest floor.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin. The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children. The Mother Trees. When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“We think that most important clues are large, but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“What is it about pushing our limits that makes us stronger? How does suffering strengthen the relationships that hold us together?”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“I’d learned to deal with conflict by running from it. I was terrible at standing my ground, never mind giving talks.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“We’d like to design our city in a way that mimics the patterns of mycorrhizal connection,” wrote a city planner from Vancouver.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“With the web uncovered, the intricacies of the belowground alliance still remained a mystery to me, until I started my doctoral research in 1992. Paper birches, with their lush leaves and gossamer bark, seemed to be feeding the soil and helping their coniferous neighbors. But how? In pulling back the forest floor using microscopic and genetic tools, I discovered that the vast belowground mycelial network was a bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species. These fungi are mutualistic. They connect the trees with the soil in a market exchange of carbon and nutrients and link the roots of paper birches and Douglas firs in a busy, cooperative Internet. When the interwoven birches and firs were spiked with stable and radioactive isotopes, I could see, using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, carbon being transmitted back and forth between the trees, like neurotransmitters firing in our own neural networks. The trees were communicating through the web!

I was staggered to discover that Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting, especially when the firs were in the shade of their leafy neighbors. This helped explain the synergy of the pair’s relationship. The birches, it turns out, were spurring the growth of the firs, like carers in human social networks. Looking further, we discovered that the exchange between the two tree species was dynamic: each took different turns as “mother,” depending on the season. And so, they forged their duality into a oneness, making a forest. This discovery was published by Nature in 1997 and called the “wood wide web.”

The research has continued unabated ever since, undertaken by students, postdoctoral researchers, and other scientists, with a myriad of discoveries about belowground communication among trees. We have used new scientific tools, as they are invented, along with our curiosity and dreams, to peer into the dark world of the soil and illuminate the social network of trees. The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system. Ours is not the only lab making these discoveries—there is a burst of careful scientific research occurring worldwide that is uncovering all manner of ways that trees communicate with each other above and below ground.”
― Suzanne Simard, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World

“What mattered was that loggers once stopped and carefully gauged and evaluated the character of individual trees to be cut. Transportation by flumes and rivers kept cuttings small and slow, whereas trucks and roads exploded the scale of operations.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“But Douglas fir and ponderosa pine were both better than the spruce and subalpine fir at minimizing water loss, helping them cope with the drought. They did this by opening their stomata for only a few hours in the morning when the dew was heavy. In these early hours, trees sucked carbon dioxide in through the open pores to make sugar, and in the process, transpired water brought up from the roots. By noon, they slammed their stomata closed, shutting down photosynthesis and transpiration for the day.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“The true prize, we all knew, was that we were together, a friendship melded out of devastating diagnoses and hardship, facing death as one, never letting one another give up, picking one another up when we couldn’t take another second”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“I loved maps; they led to adventure, discovery.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“Mary Thomas’s mother and grandmother Macrit had taught her to show gratitude for the birches, to take no more than she needed, to place an offering in thanks. Mary Thomas had even called the birches Mother Trees—long before I had stumbled onto that notion. Mary’s people had known this of the birches for thousands of years, from living in the forest—their precious home—and learning from all living things, respecting them as equal partners. The word “equal” is where Western philosophy stumbles. It maintains that we are superior, having dominion over all that is nature.”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

“from a different fungal species. More than a million exist on earth, about six times the number of plant species, with only about 10 percent of fungal species identified”
― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest