Understory
Seven wild women / Suzanne Simard
Just recently, when designing a sculptural installation for an ex-industrial site, now thriving nature reserve, we were bullied and threatened by the legal team behind a famous author who as a young man had spent much time in the area. It was an angry allergic reaction that completely caught us off guard. We had proposed to incorporate a quote comprising of just seven words, seven words that would celebrate a highly positive and ambitious volunteer led scheme to plant 39 native trees. The sculpture would champion local heritage, tastefully eulogising the time spent by the author on his aunts farm, now concreted over, but back then the farm was where the first nuggets of inspiration for his most famous trilogy were forged. Our installation was to honour all that trees have contributed to our imaginations, memorialising the labyrinthine connections between ourselves, literature and trees, the proposed artwork would have benefited local schools who would have been able to visit the sculpture and build classes around central environmental themes, inspiring a new generation of guardians of the natural world. All of this aside, the communication was clear, we were told in no uncertain terms that our work was inappropriate for the site, and if we were to go ahead and use these seven words then we had better get a good lawyer.
Unwittingly, this hostile and mean spirited communication empowered us, we realised that maybe we had been a little lazy with our initial designs and inspiration and that we should relish the fresh challenge, an opportunity to think differently, believe in our abilities, be confident in tearing up the old plans and return with designs and concepts far more exciting. What started out as a confrontational and intimidating communication, resulted in reinforcing and nourishing our positive nature, it boosted our creative resolve. Still confident in our concepts regarding trees and their ability to communicate, we sensed a fresh breeze pass through the studio, leafing the pages of the project over to reveal a new chapter, a new perspective to the same inspiration. It was still about trees, and all about communication.
When a lone seed thumps or helicopters to the forest floor, it's an age-old belief that an independent struggle for survival ensues, branches elbowing skyward for optimum canopy position, shading out all contenders, autonomous inter-arboreal warfare waged over water drop and sun beam. As we know, nature’s complex cogs and gears begin to jam when they are purely, as Tennyson described, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ it's not simply the survival of the fittest that get to endure and progenate, it's the survival of the most adaptable and trees have evolved a system so simple in complexity, that its chemical and electrical mechanisms are often likened to those of the brain.
Suzanne Simard has wooden bones and resin for blood, born in the Monashee mountains of British Columbia into a family of loggers, she entered into a world of giants where lying on her back she would gaze toward the vanishing points of seed sprouted skyscrapers. Days were passed drenched in the thick scent of sweet bark and earth, each step met with either twig crackle or the silent damp mattress of needle and moss, time stands still in places like this, sound becomes ligneous and hollow. For Suzanne it was a wonderland, she would explore the vastness of the forest with ‘Jigs’, the family dog and her grandpa, a horse logger and giant of a man, who would encourage her to route around prospecting for bugs. He would instil a magic, kindle her curiosity with forest-lore and knowledge of the hushed and cohesive workings of the forest, how a verdant towering city of trees relies on every brick for support, how everything has its place and purpose. Jigs’ curiosity got the better of him on one occasion, he had been discovered swimming in the dark waterlogged pit of the old outhouse and would be needing grandpa to dig him out, with each shovel slice of earth removed Suzanne became increasingly mesmerised, she noticed horizons of ochre, yellow and orange layer-caked beneath delicate ashen arteries, milky tributaries that feathered and flowed below the roots and black topsoil. This accidental moment flinted a spark of curiosity, which in time fired the torch that she would carry into her forestry studies in adult life.
Mycelium
Involvement in forestry became progressively painful for Suzanne, the commercial forestry automaton was seemingly out of control, hacking its way relentlessly through the forest, she was becoming increasingly alarmed by the rate that native Aspen and Birch were being torn down, replaced with clinical rows of more commercially viable trees. Realising that forestry was clashing with her heart's connection to the forest, she decided to return back to education and became interested in new laboratory research that showed the roots of pine seedlings exchanging carbon. Swimming against the current of the popular consensus that she was crazy, she set about finding funding to research whether or not trees also communicate below ground in an open forest environment. This was a brave and highly contentious idea and finding investors proved tough, so she went cheap, collecting together items from the local hardware store such as plastic bags, blackout cloth, a paper suit and respirator, borrowing the more expensive equipment such as a geiger counter and mass spectrometer from the university, there was also the more perilous gear like, syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and high pressure bottles of carbon-13 carbon dioxide, not forgetting the bug and bear spray. Through a process of injecting the selected gases into bags placed over various young trees, she would be able to see if they were communicating with each other; the dolphin cackle of the geiger counter broadcast the news, the trees were indeed in conversation, the fir under blackout cloth was receiving carbon from a birch with access to sunlight, later the research revealed that this exchange was reversed when the birch had no leaves in the winter. Suzanne knew that she had discovered something that would change the way that we look at forests forever, she discovered that trees are not competitors, they are cooperators, they were speaking in a language of not only carbon, but also of water, nitrogen, hormones and defence strategies, this was information exchange, she had discovered, as she puts it, the other world.
So how does this information get transferred? We have to go back to that ashen layer that the young Suzanne saw in the outhouse pit, this is mycelium, the rooting body attached to the fruit that we call mushrooms. These threadlike structures are so fine and so dense, that there can be hundreds of kilometers below a single foot step, these threads colonise and corrupt all plants and trees, wherever there is contact, there is an exchange of carbon for nutrients. Suzanne’s research discovered mother trees that nurture saplings in the shaded understory, delivering carbon via the network of fungal highways, these mother trees also favour their kin, creating more robust highways in order to feed their own seedlings, the mothers even distribute knowledge through chemical signalling when they are dying, this is communication, trees talk! Not literally of course and not like in the fairy tale literary world of rings and wizards that we are not allowed to quote from, but in real terms of receive and respond communication, what this teaches us is, like with any complex mechanism, remove too many parts and the whole machine collapses, the same applies to the forest, remove too many mothers and the whole wider forest life support system will fail.
Networks of mycelium, mapped information highways between trees
Some of Suzanne Simard’s research plantations are now over 30 years old, the research she carried, and continues to carry out, has resulted in, what is widely considered to be one of the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries of our time. On first reading her theories and findings you face a moment when you look up from the page, snap yourself out of the frown, then check the dust jacket notes asking yourself what the hell is this I'm reading? It's the stuff of science fiction, so fantastic that you have to re-read, play it on repeat a few times just to maintain its reality, it's the fact that something so intrinsically simple in its familiarity is now something so much more. Yes scientists will argue that talking trees and mother trees is over anthropomorphising, but this is exactly what is needed to wake the world up, we know how important and beautiful trees are, Suzanne Simard’s work has created a fresh bond to our arboreal past, she has made us take a second closer look at trees and forests and the wider environment and ask ourselves, are we are doing enough to look after them?
In our experience it seems that the more you peel away the layers, the more you understand about the natural world, the more you realise that everything we do is simply a clumsy attempt to replicate what has already been achieved by nature, Suzanne’s work is a deeply poetic example of this. Earth has grown these sentinels that watch over us, she has built these familiar life sustaining cathedrals, who’s timber vaulted naves and cloisters we wander in awe, without giving a second thought to the perpetual pulsing transmissions received and delivered below our feet, conversations concerning trials and triumphs, births and deaths, strategies and solutions for sustaining and defending their kind against attacks from disease, climate change and chainsaw. This is technology working at its purest and most brilliant, our crude modern liquid crystal and plastic internet, will forever seem outmoded in comparison to the superior organic perfection that is, the ancient wood wide web.
“When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy”