What do plants and people have in common? More than you think.

Growing up, Suzanne Simard was captivated by the multicolored layers of humus and mineral soils teeming with worms and bugs and nearly impenetrable tangles of roots coiled together with fungus. 

How, she wondered, did this exuberant life below the ground connect to the forest above it? 

In her book, “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” Simard writes about her nearly three decades of work to answer this question. As one of the world’s leading forest scientists, Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, would go on to revolutionize the way many researchers think about trees and their relationships with one another. 

Simard has become something of a celebrity scientist. She’s said to have been the model for a lead character, Patricia Westerford, in Richard Powers’ 2019 Pulitzer-winning popular novel, “The Overstory.” Her vision of the forest as being innately intelligent inspired