Appropriately, I meet the woman who changed the way we think about forests — through her 2021 eco-blockbuster, Finding the Mother Tree — in a tree-themed hotel in London. Suzanne Simard, the great Canadian forestry ecologist, appears with a wide smile. We settle on some patchwork sofas but can’t escape the disco “background” beats. “I’m worried you won’t be able to hear me,” she says. Her gentle voice is more suited to quiet forests; perhaps that’s true of all of us.
Thanks to her, our understanding of forests can be divided into two periods: After Darwin and After Simard. While Charles Darwin didn’t write that much about trees in his On the Origin of the Species in 1859, he specified that plants “struggle with each other for existence”. That was enough to cast forests as collections of individual trees locked in competition for light, water and nutrients.
