In Japanese, the word for mushroom — kinoko — literally means “child of the tree.” It’s a simple translation, but it holds a profound ecological and philosophical truth. Fungi, in a very real sense, are born from the life of trees. They are nourished by their roots, feed on their fallen bodies, and connect their living kin in a vast, invisible web of exchange. This idea — that mushrooms are the children of trees — is not just a poetic metaphor. It expresses a scientific reality that has reshaped how we understand life in forests.
Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree helped bring this hidden world into view. Her decades of research revealed that forests are not collections of isolated organisms but living communities bound together by mycorrhizal fungi — microscopic threads that link trees into vast cooperative networks. Through these networks, trees exchange carbon, nutrients, and even warning signals about drought or disease. Simard’s work revealed that forests behave less like competitive marketplaces and more like families — structured around relationships of care and reciprocity.
The Mycorrhizal Bond
The “wood wide web” has become a popular shorthand for this fungal network, but the metaphor has limits. Unlike the human internet, it is not a designed system for communication. It is older, stranger, and far more complex — a living tissue that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Fungal hyphae penetrate the soil and weave through root systems, forming symbiotic relationships known as mycorrhizae. Trees feed these fungi with sugars made through photosynthesis, while the fungi deliver water and minerals that roots could never reach alone.
This exchange is not transactional but deeply entangled. Fungi form the connective tissue of ecosystems, linking not only one tree to another but also different species across generations. In this sense, the forest’s continuity depends on fungal intelligence — on a capacity for sensing, responding, and balancing flows of energy across the living and the dead.
The Mother Tree and Her Kin
Simard’s discovery of the “mother tree” adds another dimension to this idea. Older trees, often the largest in a forest, serve as hubs of nourishment and communication. They feed saplings, sometimes even those of other species, and maintain the stability of the forest community. When a mother tree dies, its fungal network persists, redistributing its stored carbon to younger trees — life passing back through the web that once sustained it.
The Japanese notion of kinoko — the children of trees — resonates here. Fungi emerge from the work of these networks, from the nutrient-rich decay that follows a tree’s fall. The mushrooms we see are not the organism itself but its fruit — the brief visible moment of an ancient relationship. Each fruiting body is a gesture of continuation, a reminder that life feeds on life and that the death of one generation enables the next.
Beyond the Internet Analogy
Describing this as a “wood wide web” helps popularise the idea, but it risks domesticating a wild intelligence. Unlike our networks, the fungal one has no central processor or purpose. It is not a data system but a metabolic one — a web of transformations. The fungi do not communicate in words or signals but through chemistry, electricity, and flows of nutrients. Their “language” is material, their logic ecological rather than computational.
Reducing this to human metaphors imposes our own ways of thinking on a system that operates by entirely different principles. Fungal networks do not separate individual from environment; they dissolve that boundary. They remind us that the forest — and by extension, the Earth — is not a collection of parts but a single evolving body.
Blurring the Boundaries of Species
Fungi also challenge our idea of what a “species” is. Mycorrhizal fungi can connect multiple kinds of trees at once, moving nutrients between birch and fir, pine and beech. Their genetics are fluid; they can merge, split, or exchange DNA across what we might call species lines. Through these partnerships, they create communities of shared sustenance that defy the tidy categories of taxonomy.
This ecological intimacy complicates our notions of individuality. A forest is not a gathering of separate organisms but a web of overlapping lives, each depending on the others. Fungi make this interdependence visible — or rather, imaginable — through their fruiting bodies, the mushrooms that rise from the soil like messages from below.
We, Too, Are Kinoko
Perhaps humans, too, are kinoko — children of trees in a broader sense. Our lungs mirror the branching pattern of roots and hyphae. We breathe what trees exhale and exhale what they breathe. The oxygen that fills our bodies is a gift from photosynthesis; the soil that feeds our crops is shaped by fungal decay.
Recognising ourselves as “children of the trees” reframes our relationship to the natural world. It suggests not dominion, but kinship. Like fungi, we are both nurtured by and responsible for the living systems that sustain us.
A Way of Seeing
To think in the way of kinoko is to see the world as entangled, relational, and alive. It asks us to look beneath appearances — beneath the forest floor, beneath the human-centred metaphors — and recognise the networks that make life possible. The lesson of the fungi is not only ecological but ethical: that to thrive, we must care for the webs we inhabit.
We are not outside the forest; we are within it. And perhaps, like mushrooms after rain, our role is to emerge briefly, share what nourishment we can, and then return our gifts to the soil from which we came.
