mother tree
The largest, oldest, most highly connected tree in a forest — a central hub in the underground mycorrhizal network that links the roots of trees through fungal threads. Mother trees share carbon, nitrogen, water, and chemical defense signals with surrounding seedlings, especially their own kin. When a mother tree is dying, it increases the flow of resources to the young trees around it — a last act of transfer. Remove the mother tree and the network collapses; the seedlings that depended on it are on their own.
Etymology
Coined by Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, whose research beginning in the 1990s demonstrated that forests are not collections of competing individuals but interconnected communities organized around hub trees. The term is deliberate — Simard chose "mother" for its implication of nurture, kinship, and generational transfer. The concept has been criticized by some plant scientists as personification, but defended by Simard and others as an accurate description of measurable resource flows.
Notes
Indigenous peoples of British Columbia recognized these relationships long before Simard's research. The Mother Tree Project now collaborates with First Nations to develop forest management practices rooted in Indigenous knowledge.
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