" Simard suspected that the answer was buried in the soil. Underground,
trees and fungi form partnerships known as mycorrhizas: Threadlike fungi
envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and
nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for some of the
carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis. Research had
demonstrated that mycorrhizas also connected plants to one another and
that these associations might be ecologically important, but most
scientists had studied them in greenhouses and laboratories, not in the
wild. For her doctoral thesis, Simard decided to investigate fungal
links between Douglas fir and paper birch in the forests of British
Columbia. Apart from her supervisor, she didn’t receive much
encouragement from her mostly male peers. “The old foresters were like,
Why don’t you just study growth and yield?� Simard told me. “I was more
interested in how these plants interact. They thought it was all very
girlie.�
"

A lot of good reading.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...3e91b65130eb97