August 23, 2024

A year ago today I wrote an essay I called “When is a Forest a Garden?” One year and four recent books later, I am more focused on the forest, not the garden. The forest…as the savior of the planet. “If every person on Earth planted one tree per year for the next six years, we would stop climate change in its tracks” proclaims Diana Beresford-Kroeger in her 2019 book, To Speak for the Trees. She continues: “Three hundred million years ago trees took an environment with a toxic load of carbon and turned it into something that could sustain human life. They can do it again.” With such warnings as “climate change is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced” the little concerns of my 1-acre visually delightful garden by the Connecticut seaside seem alarmingly insignificant. 

Why is it that August leads me to such thoughts? For one, I am “Up in Michigan“ (riffing on long-ago local summer resident Hemingway’s famous short story), as usual, and enjoying a break from a 4-month intense immersion in my garden earlier in the season. Ensconced for 6 weeks at Lakeside Camp, a family affair of my wife since 1876, we exist within the acreage of a virgin forest of white pine (Pinus strobus) and Norway pine (Pinus resinosa), augmented with stately oaks (what species, sadly, I am clueless) many of which are slowly succumbing to oak wilt. These stately giants were wisely left mostly uncut by her lumbermen forebearers. That is, we live beneath ancient 175-ft high behemoths which occasionally crash dangerously down in dramatic thunderstorms. This year there is a second reason for forest focus. In early June, I had the pleasure of joining others at a small dinner in Brooklyn with Suzanne Simard, on the evening before she received the Better Earth Award from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The following evening I marveled as she addressed the many hundreds gathered under a vast tent in the Garden for the annual gala. Normally, a noisy affair (after an hour and a half of an open bar), this year, as Dr. Simard spoke, you could hear a pin drop. Such is her rock-star status among naturalists and forest ecologists – but also the urgent message imbedded in her ground-breaking research and extraordinary life story, all interwoven in beautiful prose in Finding the Mother Tree, published in 2021.  In a nutshell, she discovered, using radioactive carbon isotopes, how trees communicate through vast networks of underground mycorrhizal fungi. They help each other rather than solely compete, as evolutionary biology – via Darwin – has taught us to believe. Furthermore, large old trees she coined as “mother trees” are the most important in the forest as their vast networks support the ongoing life – including the regenerative life – of the forest. 

Both Simard and Beresford-Kroeger plow similar ground: each book is part compelling personal life story/part science; each uses an older culture to draw on (indigenous Canadians and Celtic Irish, respectively); each speaks of “mother trees”; each was a source of inspiration for the fictional character of Patricia Westerford in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of 2018, The Overstory; each confronted male-dominated, widely-held science supporting a capitalist economy and public forestry policy. Personally, I found Simard’s tone to be modest, while assertive, in her accomplishments while Beresford-Kroeger was occasionally boastful and arrogant. My fourth book, The Hidden Life of Trees published in 2015 by the German forester Peter Wohlleben, gives abundant credit to Simard, even including an essay by her at the end of his book. He doesn’t mention Beresford-Kroeger. I will admit to getting caught up in, for instance, who invented the concept – and term itself – of the “mother tree.” It seems from internet research, this invention is credited to Simard. If so, why does Beresford-Kroeger use it so freely without attribution? Why does she proclaim, in interviews, that she is the sole inspiration for the fictional heroine Patricia Westerford when Richard Powers makes it clear it is primarily Simard with a touch of Beresford-Kroeger? Although these issues made me momentarily suspicious, I came to realize each book – and each author – have made huge contributions to the science of the forest, and as a result of their increasing renown, have made the world understand the importance of the forest in our era of a fast-changing climate. 

Which now brings me to a more local concern, one which I wrote about in my essay of one year ago, the management of our own little remnant of the primeval Michigan forest. So dense it was in 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville, wanting to experience the American wilderness, was advised against forging ahead north of Saginaw for he would get hopelessly – and dangerously – lost in the great north woods of Michigan. This is the same forest that was clear cut, except in rare places like Lakeside Camp where I write today. In the 1870’s it seemed inexhaustible but was mostly gone by the 1890’s, in an oil-rush (or gold-rush)-like stampede of lumbermen whose only purpose was making money fast (although they did supply the post-Civil War population boom with lumber to build millions of houses all over the country). The forests here have mostly regenerated and a second-growth forest abounds. Parts of it are now being clear-cut (again!), leaving ugly swaths of land throughout the state. After reading the four books above, I believe that clear-cut is now considered generally wrong-headed by forest ecologists, although allowed, perhaps encouraged, by political authorities in the name of economic prosperity. But what should this policy be in our era of unprecedented climate change? Surely, some forests can continue to supply human needs. Suzanne Simard, from a long line of a lumbering family in British Columbia, implies this. 

I have now drifted far afield from the purpose of my blog and will bring it back home to gardening… and to Lakeside Camp which made a decision a couple of years ago to “enhance” our little forest by managing it, now mostly a 125-year-old second growth of pines, oaks, and oak (the virgin giants at the heart of the camp are, thankfully, sacrosanct). This enhancement – which came not only for no expense but yielded many thousands of dollars to pay for other camp capital needs – took out perhaps a quarter of the existing trees. Now, popping up wherever sunlight falls are thousands of American Burnweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius), almost as tall as I am which make the formerly dark forest understory look most unnatural. The benefit (other than making a buck) was said to allow more light into the forest, better for the growth of the remaining trees. Perhaps this is correct policy now that we suppress forests from catching fire and burning naturally as they once did? Are forests healthy only when manipulated like ours have been, clearly against what nature brought us, like that glorious Michigan forest de Tocqueville barely saw? These are complicated questions and, even with my newly acquired knowledge, I am quite beyond my depth to answer them. Reading “The Future is Old Growth” by Krista Langlois in the Summer 2024 issue of Sierra Magazine, I was somewhat reassured to read that foresters are divided between those like David Foster, an ecologist who spearheads Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities (a Highstead Foundation initiative) and former Director of Harvard Forest for thirty years, who espouses a “do nothing” policy, meaning nothing is cut or sprayed or planted or salvaged. On the other hand, other professionals such as Paul Catanzaro, U of Mass Amherst professor, advocate that while some forests be left alone to recover on their own, people can also hasten a forest’s recovery by actively replicating the conditions that make old growth so biologically rich and resilient. This might include thinning some trees to let others grow bigger faster, or mimicking natural disturbances by creating gaps in the canopy that allow younger saplings to sprout. So, I leave these questions simply as observations from a newly formed sceptic. I place Suzanne Simard and Diana Beresford-Kroeger with the likes of Rachel Carson who waged battle against the Big Chemicals with Silent Spring (1962) and Jane Jacobs who waged battle against Robert Moses in NYC with Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), exposing to the world that the perceived wisdom of the day (pesticides and urban renewal, respectively) was simply wrong. These two books were generally agreed to be among the ten most important books of the twentieth century. Perhaps Simard and Beresford-Kroeger will be so remembered for the twenty-first.

Is this gardening? This IS gardening writ big, as big as it gets….