In the first couple of chapters we learn something of what it was like to grow up in that small idyllic town surrounded by close family, forests, rivers, and mountains and how she developed her interest in and love for the forests. She grew up in a small rural town in the mountains and forests of British Colombia, the daughter of loggers and foresters, and cowboys. Suzanne Simard is open in sharing her life with us the readers, while also using her story to educate us about her amazing insights about the life and community of trees, and plants, and fungi that populate our forests.

Her ideas in which she believed passionately, were rejected by traditionalists in the very powerful forestry lobby in Canada, but though it was painful and frustrating, she kept at it, and over time has won great respect, not only for her ideas but for her persistence in advocating for them, and has won redemption as her theories have proven correct. I really liked the woman Suzanne Simard as she presents herself in this memoir – a shy, humble, very dedicated scientist, also a hardy backwoods woman who is comfortable in tough environments, having spent much of her life hiking in the mountains and rain forests of British Colombia. As the data from her research picks up momentum, she struggles to gain acceptance of her ideas in traditional forestry, and all along, she shares the struggles and joys she experiences in her personal life – a wonderful combination ground-breaking biological insights and personal memoir. Suzanne Simard shares her life story, intermingling major events in her personal life with discoveries her professional research has made into the many ways in which trees and plants communicate and share resources with each other. Summary in 3 Sentences: This a combination personal memoir and a recent history of how forest ecology has come to accept that trees are connected communities and communicate with each other in ways previously unknown to biologists. When I saw that she’d written her own book telling her story, I was intrigued and chose to read it. That character was based on Suzanne Simard.

Why this book: I had read the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers, the 2019 Pulitzer prize for fiction winner, and was very intrigued by a character in the book who had explored the connections between trees and within forests, who had been ostracized and viewed as a crank – until her ideas were validated.

The overstory sparknotes