‘Highly Intelligent’: A Forestry Scientist’s Journey of Discovering How Trees Communicate

Suzanne Simard’s memoir, ‘Finding the Mother Tree,’ is being adapted into a feature film

University of British Columbia forest ecology professor Suzanne Simard poses with the remains of an old cedar in Haida Gwaii, B.C., in 2017. Jean Roach

Suzanne Simard discovered a fascinating fact about trees: They communicate and interact with each other using below-ground fungal networks, what she calls biological pathways. Not only that, she found that trees also have cognitive capabilities in terms of perception, learning, and memory.

Simard’s research led to the recognition that forests have hub trees, or “mother trees”—big, old trees that play an important role in flow of information and resources in a forest.