Mothering trees and other frivolous folklore
I’m returning to the theme of how, why and when language is used to ostracise people.
Do you know about the mothering tree? In last weekend’s review of Hannah Kent’s novel Devotion, I referenced Suzanne Simard’s remarkable book Finding The Mother Tree (2021). Simard, a Canadian forester and scientist, has written extensively and at first controversially about the language of trees and the invisible networks of mycorrhiza that communicate under foot to keep forests alive. Simard has been careful about the language she uses to describe her research. In a conservative, male dominated field, descriptors like ‘mothering trees’ are dismissed as frivolous folklore, because to see is to know and all those mothering nodes… well, you can’t see them.
So today, I’m returning to the theme of how, why and when language is used to ostracise people. And I’m going back to the language of the mothering trees ‘cause it feels like a metaphor for this time. Basically, little trees flourish when they exist in a community around a dominant mother tree. If cast out – by chance of a bird carrying a seed too far or man planting mass produced seedlings in plantation blocks – the trees become weak and flounder. Sounds a bit like me at the moment.
Anyway, not long after I read Simard’s book, the New Yorker published a profile on Peter Wohlleben, another writer who loves trees.
The piece was expansive, scientists and researchers were consulted and many remarked that they can’t bear to read Wohlleben’s work. His main offence, it seems, is to personify trees; to use the language of the mothering tree. Wohlleben is a New York Times Best Selling author. His books are popular but to his colleagues in forestry and dendrology, he’s unreadable – a peddler of folklore and fantasy.
The dismissal of work that uses the language of (female) folklore to popularise dry science is a persistent issue in academia. The problem, as I see it, is that in the dismissal we risk missing a lot of useful knowledge because we fail to “embrace our place in nature as one with nature,” as Simard says.
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