l to r: Annette LeBox and Crystal Smith

In 2021, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard upended the way we think about the natural world with her groundbreaking Finding the Mother Tree. In that book, she explained how trees in forests, even those of different species, communicate with each other through complex underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi, with “mother trees” playing a crucial role in the health of the forest ecosystem by facilitating nutrient sharing. It’s truly mind-blowing stuff.

Those concepts – interspecies communication and co-operation, a benign maternal force presiding over it all – are catnip for a kids’ book, so it was only a matter of time before someone took a stab at it. But while Annette LeBox’s at times charming Mother Aspen, beautifully illustrated by Crystal Smith, manages to get many of Simard’s basic ideas across, its goals are often undermined by an awkward melding of science and the poetic (LeBox is an environmental activist and poet).

After reading, for instance, that an aspen’s leaves produce sugar that’s used to grow its wood, bark, and leaves, we’re further told that, “Like human children, young trees love sweets!” Which is confusing: are the trees using the sugar or consuming it, as a child would a lollipop? The comparison with candy will no doubt also leave kids with the impression that the sugar that trees produce is the same stuff they sprinkle on their cereal in the morning.

Illustration: Crystal Smith.

A more consistent approach to terms, or even a glossary, would have been welcome. Mushrooms, for example, are defined (as the “fruiting bodies” produced by fungi) while catkins – a word surely less familiar to most kids – are not.

In a sense, the sheer wondrous-ness of the base material eclipses the poetic licence LeBox yearns to take. If trees really do have “lively conversations,” as she puts it, then why wouldn’t a child take it literally when, at the end of the book, they read that the dead aspen, now a “nurse log,” will “dream of her young trees”?

Its well-intentioned earnestness aside, it’s hard not to feel that Mother Aspen would have been more effective were it written as straightforward science.