Finding the Mother Tree
- Author Suzanne Simard
- Narrator Suzanne Simard
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Run Time 12 hours and 14 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Applied ecology, Botany and plant sciences, Popular science, Trees, wildflowers and plants: general interest.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- £7.99
- £6.99
- £5.99
- £4.99
- £3.99
Listen to a sample
What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A dazzling scientific detective story from the ecologist who first discovered the hidden language of trees
No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard. Now she shares the secrets of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their cooperation, healing capacity, memory, wisdom and sentience.
Raised in the forests of British Columbia, where her family has lived for generations, Professor Simard did not set out to be a scientist. She was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest.
Though her ground-breaking findings were initially dismissed and even ridiculed, they are now firmly supported by the data. As her remarkable journey shows us, science is not a realm apart from ordinary life, but deeply connected with our humanity.
In Finding the Mother Tree, she reveals how the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for our existence - offers profound lessons about resilience and kinship, and must be preserved before it's too late.
© Suzanne Simard 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Critics Review
-
A scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series… Just as she disinters earthy mushrooms and the finest of filaments, so she lays bare the human heart with moving simplicity… It is her gallant mission in the book and in her life – and one essential to combating the climate crisis – to make science more humanly engaged
Observer -
Finding the Mother Tree is the kind of story we need to be telling, a new way of communicating that the world desperately needs to hear… A reminder to listen to our wilder selves, and to remember, with humility, how little we know of the complexities of the natural world
Guardian -
This book is a testament to Simard’s skill as a science communicator. Her research is clearly defined, the steps of her experiments articulated, her astonishing results explained and the implications laid bare: We ignore the complexity of forests at our peril
The New York Times -
A masterwork of planetary significance
Booklist (starred review) -
[Simard] is an intellectual force… Simard’s results are so revolutionary and controversial that they have quickly worked their way into social theory, urban planning, culture and art… We have a lot of rethinking to do about the economic and political models that, since Darwin, have been taken to be natural
Independent -
Finding the Mother Tree has come at a crucial moment… With biodiversity on a knife edge, the need to appreciate and understand the complexity and brilliance of the natural world could not be more important
Financial Times
Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.