The Mother Tree

Here in northern California we know what a mother tree is: each cathedral ring of redwoods has a mother tree.

The primary methods of propagation for redwoods is unique among forests. Redwoods propagate themselves in four ways: through seeds, cuttings, stump sprouts, and root sprouts. (Skene, 2011).  While also producing a crop of cones that contain seeds carried away by wildlife each year and planted in the usual manner for plant life, he mother tree “clones” herself through root sprouts with saplings.  Over thousands of years each of these saplings grows into a tree that, collectively, form rings. These redwood rings were coined “cathedrals” by early settlers and the California State park system calls them “fairy rings”. Each ring has an ancient matriarch: the mother tree. Each new tree has the potential of becoming a mother tree as the older trees succumb to time, storm falls and the many things that happen in a wild forest. These rings are interconnected by a complex root system and their attendant mycorrhizal network distributing water, nutrients and, according to modern biology, the wisdom of the forest, including warnings of danger and protecting young saplings from invasive plant species.

Each tree is home to a myriad host of living creatures, from burrowing gophers and rabbits to the ubiquitous gray squirrels and chipmunks, insect life and a thousand species of birds: songbirds, corvids, and raptors. The great redwood rings shelter fox, deer, wolves, marmets, coyote, and summer hikers. Only the most callous person who ever wandered the trails has failed to see the great wonder and beauty of the redwoods: the magical treasure of the western coastal environment.

The tallest, oldest trees in groves are called “grandmother trees”. When practicing selective, sustainable forestry, the grandmother tree is always left standing. As a sequoia sempervirens, a coastal redwood, she is a giant. As a giant sequoia in the high Sierras, she is the largest living thing on the Earth. In some northern conifer forests, in local parlance, this tree is called a spar and is often the nest and home to raptors, especially the great eagles. Sequoia create their environment, catching moisture from the coastal marine layer and “raining” from their branches. In the Sierras, the crowns are high up on the trunks as a protection from wildfire. Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem and the First Nation peoples knew how to use low temperature burns to clear the undergrowth and detritus on the forest floor and protect the the great trees as well as provide space and nutrients for the plant life that provided the people with ample food, shelter, abundant wildlife, and all the essentials of life.

In the 21st century, it has become clear that, if we are to live beyond this era with a healthy environment and control the massive wildfires in an increasingly arid American west, we must re-examine our relationship with the forests and understand the evolution of trees. We must learn the uses of fire in a fire ecology and how to restore the wildlands that sustain us as a species. Redwoods once stretched from the Pacific to the windward slopes of the Rockies, from the Northern range of the Cascades to Baja, sharing forest space with pines, firs, aspen, alder, great oaks, and spruce as well as wild nut and fruit bearing trees. Where they are gone, due to climate changes after the ice age and, in the last 150 years, to logging interests, the climate is less moist, hotter, more arid, more subject to drought and wildfire that kills the heart of the forest: the mycorrhizal networks that lie hidden in the root systems. Where forest monoculture “plantations” have replaced the natural mix of conifers and deciduous trees, where fire is suppressed and not controlled by First Nations people who understand the use of fire, disease and parasitic infestations have killed millions of trees, leaving the forest open to the the devastation of wildfires that burn hotter, more out of control each year. This danger of wildfire has reached into the cities of the west with smoky skies and days when there is no power as the grid shuts down to avoid sparks from faulty transmission lines and electrical transformers. Hot summer days and balmy Autumn afternoons when we who live here would, normally, wander the byways of the coastal range, the Cascades, and the Sierras enjoying the beauty of the western coast is a pass time we can no longer partake in as the flames surround our communities and destroy them.

Suzanne Simard, biologist, wrote a book,  Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Over many years of research, Dr. Simard discovered something magical, something secret, something completely unexpected and completely logical: through a network of mycorrhiza, the forest communicates with itself. The mother trees nourish and, even protect, their saplings. Dr. Simard explains how the mycorrhizal networks of the world’s forests connect the forest in unique ways, passing information, nutrients, and, as she says, the wisdom of being a tree from one generation to the next. The forest is a living, breathing system: a network of living organisms dependent upon the complex web of roots and their colonizing fungi, each species unique to the type of forest in which it grows. Each species is interconnected with all the species in the forest in complex and, yet, sublimely elegant ways. She explains her findings in a video: https://youtu.be/V4m9SefyRjg “The secret language of trees” (Defrenne and Simard, Jul 1, 2019).

Image: Lassen National Park. 2014. L. Kinyon.

This great communication of forest wisdom has been going on for 400 million years. Trees can live for 1000s of years, the oldest tree on earth is a bristlecone pine in the high Sierra that has been carbon dated to 5,000 years old. The great sequoia of the southern Sierra are estimated to be between 2,500-3,000  years old. In the life of a forest, they are younglings. Yet, these trees are mother trees who carry the wisdom of the forest from the first trees so many millennia ago.

 

In my art and work as a writer, in the editing I do here on Coreopsis, the idea of the mother trees, living, breathing, an axis mundi, the “world tree” that symbolizes the center of the earth, rooted in the underworld, stretching into the cosmos. (Eliade, 1957), is a mythic symbol that I carry with me with every word. This, I admit, was easier when I began my life in writing years ago when writing happened on paper. The product of forestry. Each sheet is a leaf of a tree, with my words the seeds: sent into the world as poems, stories, essays. This is a very poetic way of looking at the work of writers and artists, although, in many ways, it is true. Today, while we seek alternatives to wood pulp paper and work to protect the remaining forests, we can learn from the wisdom of the mother tree as she writes the future in mycorrhizal networks and learn to understand how to live on this planet without exploitation or irretrievably damaging our homeworld finding and knowing the Mother Trees and listen to their wisdom. Spiraling into the center, let us re-wild our hearts as well and find the deep connection with the World Tree in our own hearts

February 27, 2022