The Subterranean Brain of the Forest The Subterranean Brain of the Forest
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Daniel Mróz – drawing from the archives (no. 470–471/1954)
Nature

The Subterranean Brain of the Forest

How Trees Communicate
Maria Hawranek
Reading
time 8 minutes

Under the forest litter, trees build a network of connections that could be the envy of humans. It transports not only nutrients, but also information – about fires, droughts and environmental conditions. This speech of trees, and the relationships connecting them, were discovered by a certain persistent Canadian.

In one of the chapters of his book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben gives a rather enigmatic description of how it was proved that various trees species can communicate. He doesn’t, however, refer us to the research. The secret behind that mysterious experiment is an extraordinary woman and her ground-breaking discoveries from 35 years ago, which permanently changed our perception of trees. They initiated a whole range of research regarding the symbiosis of trees and mushrooms at the Faculty of Forestry (University of British Columbia, Vancouver). On Polish Wikipedia, almost every other piece of information concerning mycorrhizal networks refers to the research co-authored by the Canadian. Recently she also inspired Richard Powers, author of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. The writer used her biography to create the fictional character of the dendrologist Patricia Westerford.

Meet Suzanne Simard, who was the first to prove that trees communicate.

Favour for favour

Simard – the granddaughter of a logger who ferried trees out of the forest using horses (which is

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