Teachers

It is quite wonderful to discover an interesting character in a novel and then find that it is based upon the life of a real person. In this case it is Suzanne Simard, who appears in Richard Power’s The Overstory.

What she has discovered after years of forest research, and its dismissal by other scientists, is that trees in a forest, like people, have relationships - and one tree may act as a protector of other younger ones. We can learn from the forest’s wisdom. We know that people use networks; what she has found is that there are similar patterns in the plant world. In the same way that thoughts and feelings are hidden within our unconscious, there are similar ones in the plant world unseen and underground.

I’ll le her speak for herself here: