The book is part memoir of Simard's career in forestry, part exploration of new theories about how forests work. Her thesis: plants communicate through an underground mycorrhizal network and share resources that flow from hub trees, "mother trees," to places of greatest need. Forests with healthy older trees, can adjust more easily to environmental stressors. With multiple hub trees, overlapping networks of connection make a forest more resilient.
I haven't yet read the book, and even if I had, wouldn't be able to give the breadth of depth of her research in just a few short paragraphs. What I heard, as I listened to the interview, was a reflection of what I know to be true in the human forests around me. Urban neighborhoods with a strong Mother Tree in place are healthier, and happier. Churches blessed with wise, generous Mother Trees can withstand stresses and nurture younger believers better than those without.
My own grandmother was a Mother Tree. Elda Capra was fifth of 9 children in a poor rural family, ran away at 13, married at 16. She came to faith listening to a itinerant evangelist on a street corner in Oklahoma sometime in her early twenties, when she was already the mother of three small boys. In an angry, abusive marriage, she immersed herself in scripture and prayer. By her sixties she had become a hub of nurture for dozens of families who looked to her for prayer, advice and wisdom. I watched from the edges of that as her own years of struggle were turned to grace for other families in their own times of stress.
Another Mother Tree was Doris Neilson, director of the camp where I worked in my college years. She had lost a child in a camp riflery accident, yet continued her camp work without reserve. In a time and context when so many others were telling young women, "No, you can't," her message was always, "you can." That message still ripples through the lives of so many of us. When everyone else insisted we follow, Doris saw us as leaders, and showed us what that looked like.
My mother-in-law, Althea Kuniholm, is another Mother Tree. Now 92, she is still writing poetry, still prompting those around her to read, and think, and talk, still inventing games and investing time and love in children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
Of course Mother Trees don't need to be mothers. They don't need to be women. They DO need to be wiling to put give more than they get, to listen well, to share beyond their own control.
The image Jesus used wasn't of a tree, but a vine. Our sermon last week was from John 15, a passage I memorized as a kid because I found it so comforting:
I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.
Our rector, Richard Morgan, told of his experience seeing the the Great Vine of Hampton Court, the palace of Henry VIII built in the early 1500s. The vine was planted in 1768 and is now the largest and oldest in the world. It yields over 600 pounds of grapes a year.
Richard focused on pruning, an important part of that passage in John, and of that metaphor. But my interest has always been in that sense of connection: if you remain in me, and I in you, you will bear much fruit.
For some, Mother's Day can be a lonely day, a day of sadness, regret, "if only", "I wish." We don't all have warm relationships with mothers or children. For some, the day can be a reminder of how very alone we feel.
But we are all part of an invisible network. We all draw sustenance, in some way, from others. We all can become part of those channels of grace for someone more fragile than ourselves.
I have much more to learn about Mother Trees. More to learn about how that might apply to my own small backyard woods, to my own human networks. I have more to learn about becoming a healthy Mother Tree myself.
But today, I celebrate the Mother Trees in my life, the networks I live in, the grace every part of those networks share with me.
Thanks for being part of that. Happy Mother's Day.
