Where to See the Real Living Dead

Talk of “Mother Trees,” from a scientist studying plant life, can sound fanciful, like something out of a fairy tale. Suzanne Simard is here to tell you that it’s not. For the past two decades, Simard, a professor in the Department of Forest & Conservation at the University of British Columbia, has studied an unappreciated underworld—what lies beneath sprinklings of mushrooms we tend to regard in isolation, rather than as the fruiting tips on the forest floor of a sprawling subterranean network intertwined with surface roots.

Simard specializes in the study of mycorrhizae: a symbiosis of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Mycorrhizae-linked trees, she has shown, form networks, with individuals she dubbed Mother Trees at the center of communities that are in turn linked to one another, exchanging nutrients and water in a literally pulsing web that includes not