Renewing an Oasis, the Fungal Way

Somewhere Betwixt Devils & the Deep, Part 5

Note to readers: Thank you for re-joining me on this (temporarily) delayed exploration of dryland life. I’ll write more of my recent period of vision loss, ongoing recovery, and reassessment of life objectives in future Water into Stone essays, as we venture onward into whatever lies ahead.

For generations, my family has made its living cutting down forests. Our survival has depended on this humble trade.

It is my legacy.

I have cut down my fair share of trees as well.

But nothing lives on our planet without death and decay. From this springs new life, and from this birth will come new death. This spiral taught me to be a sower of seeds too, a planter of seedlings, a keeper of saplings, a part of the cycle. — excerpt from Connections, the introduction to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest [Vintage Books, 2021]

The saplings are awaiting spring, young leaves and blossoms lending color to our mudroom, their roots biding time in pots and fabric bags arranged along one wall, as late winter storms nip at SW Colorado’s early budding trees and a few optimistic seedlings outside the windows. It’s been a mild winter, the soil warming enough to signal springtime to bulbs we planted last October, but recent snow has reasserted itself into the timeline, so the first tender flowers from the bulbs lie wilted and forlorn along the front fence. Below ground though, myriad roots and fungi continue to intermingle, transforming decayed life into nutrients, exchanging moisture, chemicals and information to nourish the above ground growth. The young peach trees’ roots will soon join this community, once their predecessor peach tree—now well established in our backyard three years after its own arrival—begins leafing out.

From my vantage, it’s impossible to see what underground relationships the saplings’ root balls brought north from Southern Arizona a couple of weeks ago, after we uprooted them from their birth soil, but I do know that these trees have made a journey back to their family’s ancestral home, their parent tree having sprouted from a western Colorado peach’s seed almost 30 years ago. Walking by the saplings each morning, we greet them with wishes for long, fruitful lives in their new home, an expression of respect that should be extended to all recently arrived immigrants.

Decay begetting life is a lesson offered each year in a forest allowed to respond to the signals of seasons and climatic changes. Just how this happens though, has been a point of speculation and debate among forest dwellers for as long as humans have moved among the trees seeking their own sustenance—and/or profit. Suzanne Simard translated a life spent amongst trees, first in a family dependent on logging western Canada’s native forest for their own sustenance, then for a short time as a timber company employee charged with establishing growth plans for the company’s forest plantations, before establishing herself as a leading forestry researcher with Canada’s Forest Service. She eventually became a university professor advocating for the survival wisdom being communicated underneath the surface of North America’s ever-diminishing western forests. In the process, she has learned, interpreted, advanced and communicated knowledge long experienced by forest denizens of many species, while widening scientific understanding of underground processes that make aboveground growth possible.

I first experienced some of these relationships decades ago, first as a child in a logging family, and recognized them again in books written over the last two centuries and in the tenets of Deep Ecology (as I’ve addressed earlier in this series of essays), so I was delighted to read Dr. Simard’s book. It seems a good place to finish this series about the ongoing, wicked problem of human over-exploitation of earth’s habitats and life forms, in this era known as the “Anthropocene”—a term that itself displays the conceit that plagues most schemes proposed to “solve” the problems our species has created.

For the balance of this post, I’ll focus on research concepts Dr. Simard presented in Finding the Mother Tree, and link to some resources for those who would like to explore further among the communities living, dying, and being reborn from our planet’s soils. This is, necessarily due to space and copyright limits, a snapshot of Dr. Simard’s decades of research efforts and discoveries, and I hope you will consider reading her book as part of your own, deeper explorations.

Here are two passages describing the author’s early efforts to understand how forests work underground…

I dug through sheets of hard clay, each layer cloaked in black fans of fungal threads.I held a clump close to my eye and saw the tiny threads growing straight through the soil pores. Working my knife through the layers, I realized that every single sheet was coated in the fungal network. I hit a soft spot, as if I’d poked a cooked potato, and carved through the clay until a dark round truffle stared back at me, its black rind fissured…I uncovered a black strand flowing out of the truffle. It looked like a thick black umbilical cord, wiry and tough, and made of many individual fungal strands twisted and packed together, like ribbons around a maypole. The strands themselves came out of the black fans caking the clay sheets before knitting themselves into one. The cord was packed into clay, so I chiseled off more soil to see where it went. With about fifteen minutes of work, I followed it to a whitish-purplish cluster of fat Douglas fir root tips. I poked the tips with my knife—they had the same softness and texture as a mushroom. — from chapter 3, Parched [Finding the Mother Tree, page 59]

A conversation with a co-worker widens the young researcher’s concepts…

“…The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth.”

“The trees are like us?And they’re teachers?”, I asked…

She nodded, “The Coast Salish say that the trees also teach about their symbiotic nature. That under the forest floor, there are fungi that keep the trees connected and strong.” — excerpt from chapter 4, Treed [ibid, page 66]

Later experiments provided some answers, and many more questions…

I needed more evidence that alder was a facilitator, not just a competitor. But it could take decades of alder removal—the downturn in nitrogen fixation, decomposition, and mineralization—to show up in lost productivity. I couldn’t wait that long. Besides, the seedlings seemed to sense nitrogen depletion almost immediately. The needles of pines in bare earth had less nitrogen than the the ones among the alder after one year. There had to be a more direct between alder and pine. — from chapter 6, Alder Swales [ibid, page 120]

A group of green leaders emerged from the snow. I’d planted these seedlings without a barrier, leaving them to connect with the rich fungal network of the alders. All had put on a centimeter of new growth last summer, and each had a fat new terminal bud. I scraped away the snow, shallow here because of the warming stems, and peeled back the centimeters-deep litter. Thick, richly colored mycorrhizas like a Renaissance painting wended through the organic horizon, and I suddenly felt lighter, hopeful. I uncovered the root of a seedling and traced a dark Rhizopogon strand connecting it to a giant Douglas fir a few meters away. Another root was coated in a shimmering yellow mycorrhizal fungus, a Piloderma, and I followed the fleshy yellow threads to an old birch. I sat back, startled. This little seedling was entwined in a prosperous mycorrhizal network with both the mature Douglas fir and the paper birch. — from chapter 9, Quid Pro Quo [ibid, page 167]

I now knew that birch and fir were connected and communicated, but it didn’t make sense that birch always gave more carbon to fir than it received in return. If this were always so, fir might eventually drain the life out of birch.

Were there times in life fir might give more to birch than it received? Perhaps when the forest was older and fir had naturally outgrown birch there was a net transfer from fir to birch. — from chapter 9, Quid Pro Quo [ibid, page169]

Dr. Simard’s ongoing research, plus collaborations with other researchers exploring similar theories worldwide, have convinced her that the answers lie in communities like the ones she described above, and that trees and other plants of a forest act as aboveground members attached through their root systems to belowground mycorrhizal networks in a mostly symbiotic network, as the Coastal Salish, along with other long-time forest dwellers, had long believed and practiced. The scientific processes are still being refined, studied, and debated wherever humans have an interest in growing and/or cutting down trees, but the processes go on beneath us, cycling death into life, slowly re-covering what has been scarred and laid bare on the surface.

Here’s an eloquent summation of Dr. Suzanne Simard’s scientific journey thus far, from discovery, through initial skepticism and resistance, to a widening acceptance of the concepts…

When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. There’s no control! the reviewers cried at my early papers. Somehow with my Latin squares and factorial designs, my isotopes and mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, I have come full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: Diversity matters. And everything in the universe is connected—between the forests and prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all other creatures. — from chapter 15, Passing the Wand [ibid, page 283]

As spring gives way to summer, the young peach trees will be spreading roots into their new home, and with luck and a modicum of attention from the established community, most will contribute beauty, shade, nectar, fruit, and underground nutrients in return—and some will likely beget seedlings of their own. Past a certain point in a life, nurturing the young is a statement of faith in the continuation of life after the end of one’s own time on the planet. From seeds into soil and back again, the cycle endures.

Up next, I’ll be posting dispatches from my home region’s budding spring, as the high country’s snowpack flows deeper into layers of stone that once were seabeds and swamps in: Time, Space, & Rivers Flowing—a Continuum. Until then, keep the faith and enjoy our beautiful home planet. — B.

• Recent scientific journal publications demonstrate a widening international academic (1.)—and perhaps more critically, governmental (2.)—acceptance and embrace of the underground processes healthy forests depend upon:

1. How mycorrhizal associations drive plant population and community biology, [Science Magazine, Vol. 367, No. 6480., 21 February, 2020]

2. An Overview of Mycorrhiza in Pines: Research, Species, and Applications [Plants, Vol. 13, Issue 4

• As a final encouragement to pursuing a deeper understanding of relationships within our communities of life, I’ll offer Dr. Simard’s own statement of purpose for her book, Finding the Mother Tree: