11/27/2023 0 Comments Life is strange 2 mushroom![]() And I started thinking about, instead of individual plants, the forest as a system, and the implications for how we manage forests, which I really hadn’t seen covered at all. Simard had given a TED talk and people had certainly written about her research, but as far as I could tell, her story had never been told in a longform magazine narrative. I know of at least two or three more books about plant intelligence and communication in the works right now. Especially recently: Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees,” Richard Powers’s “The Overstory,” David George Haskell’s “The Forest Unseen” and “The Songs of Trees,” and also Simard’s book, “Finding the Mother Tree,” which is coming out in May. Every few years there seems to be some new phase of interest in it. ![]() I’ve known about Suzanne Simard’s research for about 10 years and I wanted to write something about plant intelligence and communication, which is a perennial favorite among science writers and general readers. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity, and is followed by an annotation of his story. I spoke with Jabr about how he pulled it off. The piece bowled me over because its author, Ferris Jabr, somehow manages to marry big ideas in evolutionary biology with majestic writing and an almost mystical take on the interconnectedness of the forest ecosystem. Over the last quarter-century, Simard has researched how mycorrhiza act as a cooperative network that benefits both fungi and trees, and perhaps even a system through which trees can communicate with and help each other. The story follows the work of an ecologist, Suzanne Simard, who studies how these relationships, called mycorrhiza, appear to weave the forest together. Mushrooms cohabitating with trees and ground cover on a forest floor in Maryland.Ī heady feature published in The New York Times Magazine last month (December 2020), called “ The Social Life of Forests,” explores that hidden underground world, where mycelium forms close relationships with the roots of plants and trees. The root of fungal magic lies in the mycelium - a vast web that often threads beneath the soil. They are merely the spore-spreaders, equivalent to the fruit or flowers of a plant. Others are bizarre or even garish: black or greyish fingers emerging from the soil, a veiled penis with a Cheerio hat.īut although the gawking is grand above-ground, what’s even more awesome, in the original sense of the word, is that the mushrooms that pop up after a humid or rainy spell are just the tip of the iceberg in the fungal kingdom. Some are stereotypical stem-and-cap jobs like the ones that Lewis Carroll planted in the Western imagination. If you’ve ever tuned your eyes to this strange sliver of life, you know that mushrooms exist in a head-spinning array of colors, shapes, and sizes. ![]() That’s not because I fear to lose my footing, but because poking through the duff or loitering on a mossy log or squatting at the edge of the trail is where I might spot a mushroom - to me, the most exciting forest find. Ted Ringger When I walk in the forest, my eyes almost always scan the ground. Mushrooms bursting through the forest floor in a wooded area of Maryland.
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