Lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy undoubtedly will recall the "Ents": sentient tree-like creatures who communicate and protect each other in the forests of Middle Earth. The stuff of fantasy, right? Well, no. Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, has spent her life demonstrating through vigorous and peer-reviewed scientific studies that the trees of our North American forests are sentient, much like Tolkien's ents. They communicate and cooperate with each other through a vast underground network of mycorrhizal fungi.

Professor Simard's research has demonstrated that trees use chemicals to relay information across synaptic gaps between the fungi and the root cells of the tree that are identical to the neurotransmitters used in human brains. Her colleagues have likened this discovered network to the internet, or more aptly, the "wood wide web."

Her book is a highly readable, well-woven tale of autobiography and science. She recounts her childhood living in remote areas of British Columbia, and her family who for generations had lived and died working for the timber industry. As a young girl, she developed an early fascination for trees, and more generally, Nature. As a young adult, she found work with a large timber company, one of the first women to be employed and assigned field work by the company.  There, and again later in academia, she faced rampant sexism, particularly after she began to challenge the methods by which companies attempted to grow seedlings in areas decimated by the clear-cutting of tens of thousands of acres of old-growth forest.

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