Family Roots and Belonging Across Generations

On origin trees, daughter trees, and learning to become part of the canopy

I recently came across a reflection on the oldest trees in a forest—the great, established trees whose roots and fungal partners form part of an intricate underground network.

The idea is closely associated with the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her research helped change the way many of us imagine a forest: not simply as a collection of individual trees competing for light, water and space, but as a living community shaped by relationships above and below the ground.

Through mycorrhizal fungi, the roots of trees can become linked in complex networks. Carbon and other resources can move through these associations. Signals and stresses in one part of the forest can affect life elsewhere. The precise meaning and importance of this movement remain the subject of scientific debate, and we should be careful not to turn trees into humans wearing bark. But the larger ecological truth is difficult to miss.

A tree never grows alone.

It grows from what came before it, beside what surrounds it, and towards a future it may never fully see.

The origin trees

The post made me think immediately of my mother and father.

They are my origin trees.

This does not mean that our family has always resembled an undisturbed forest. Families have their droughts, fires, broken branches and long seasons in which parts of the ecosystem grow separately. To call someone an origin tree is not to pretend that the story has been perfect. It is to acknowledge something more fundamental: my life began within the conditions created by theirs.

Before I had language, I was already receiving.

I inherited biology, temperament, memory and culture. I inherited ways of surviving, ways of working, ways of making sense of uncertainty. Some things were taught deliberately. Others travelled more quietly—through example, repetition, family stories, strengths, silences and patterns that took me years to recognise.

My mother and father are now 79. As I grow older, I am becoming more conscious that the trees at the beginning of my own story will not always stand exactly as they do today. Their age has changed the way I see time. Ordinary moments carry more weight. A conversation, a shared meal, a small act of care, or simply knowing that they are nearby no longer feels ordinary at all.

Ageing also changes the direction in which care appears to flow. The people who once formed the environment around us may begin to need support from the lives they helped establish. But this is not a neat reversal. I have not stopped being their daughter because I sometimes help hold the system around them. Their presence continues to locate me. Their memories reach further back than mine. They remain connected to soil I have never touched and to people whose influence still lives in me.

Origin trees do not cease to be origins when daughter trees mature.

Becoming a daughter tree

I am the oldest daughter and the oldest granddaughter.

For much of my life, I understood these simply as facts of birth order. Increasingly, I experience them as a place within a living system.

The oldest daughter often grows close to the family’s changing weather. She notices what is needed. She remembers where things came from. She learns, sometimes without deciding to, how to translate between generations and how to carry knowledge from one part of the family to another.

I can now feel myself becoming a maturing daughter tree.

Not a mother tree in the romanticised sense of endlessly giving until nothing remains. Healthy systems do not require one member to become the entire forest. I am learning that stewardship is not the same as self-erasure. A tree must remain rooted, nourished and alive if it is to offer shade.

But I do recognise a changing responsibility.

I have gathered knowledge across science, health, technology, business and life. Much of what I learn, I instinctively bring back to the family system. I share it with my siblings. I try to make complexity clearer, identify risks that others may not yet see, and connect information that would otherwise remain scattered. Sometimes I offer practical support. Sometimes I offer perspective. Sometimes I simply hold a thread between people, stories and possibilities.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet tasks of a maturing daughter tree: not to tell every other tree how to grow, but to keep useful knowledge moving through the grove.

Wisdom is different from information. Information can be transferred quickly. Wisdom takes time, mistakes, observation and humility. It forms ring by ring.

I am not yet one of the oldest trees. I still need the orientation of those who came before me. Yet I am no longer a sapling either. I stand somewhere in the middle—receiving from older roots, supporting growth beside me, and learning what is mine to pass forward.

Establishing a new family ecosystem

There was a time when I was still a fairly young daughter tree myself, raising teenage children beneath a canopy that had begun in South Africa.

Then I took a leap.

I brought my children to Australia, and together we began establishing a new family ecosystem.

Migration is often described as leaving one place and beginning again in another. But living systems are seldom divided so neatly. I did not arrive without roots. South Africa remained in our language, memories, instincts and family relationships. Australia became our home, but the older soil travelled with us.

Nor did I make the journey as an individual tree looking for somewhere new to stand. My son and daughter were already growing—old enough to have formed roots in one country, but still young enough to be shaped by another. We had to adapt together to unfamiliar conditions and establish new relationships, knowledge and belonging.

Looking back, I can see that this was one of the defining acts of my life as a daughter tree. I carried part of the family system across continents and trusted that it could live, change and continue in different ground.

My son has since put down roots of his own in Australia. And through him, my grandson has appeared: the tender growth of another generation. His life is evidence that the ecosystem we began establishing here is no longer only an extension of the one we left. It has produced new life of its own.

There is something profound in watching a grandchild grow in soil that was once foreign to his grandmother.

He will inherit stories from South Africa, but Australia will form part of his original ground. What was migration for me may simply be home for him. One generation made the crossing; another learned to root; the next begins with belonging.

And then there is my daughter.

Perhaps she may one day play a role similar to mine—not by repeating my choices, but by extending the family ecosystem further in a direction that belongs to her. She may establish herself in another place, another community or another way of life, carrying something of us into conditions I cannot yet imagine. Perhaps fittingly, her own work already keeps her close to trees.

This is a possibility, not an expectation. Children are not branches we are entitled to train into a shape of our choosing. The deeper task is to help create the strength from which another life can take root wherever it is called to grow.

My daughter carries parts of her original ecosystem with her, but she is not required to recreate it. She will form her own networks and contribute something to a landscape I cannot design or control. If she expands our ecosystem further, it will be through the life she chooses—not through an obligation to continue mine.

Her independence is not a severed root.

It is evidence that life has travelled.

The connection between parent and adult child changes form. Support becomes less about directing growth and more about remaining available: a source of memory, perspective, nourishment and belonging when it is needed. Love learns to cross distance without trying to eliminate it.

The family as a living system

We often describe a family as a tree. We draw a trunk with neat branches and place names along a hierarchy. But real families may be better understood as ecosystems.

They contain multiple generations, changing roles, periods of closeness and separation, competing needs, old injuries, new growth and relationships that are largely invisible from the surface. What happens to one person can travel through the whole system. So can courage. So can fear, knowledge, care and healing.

No single member controls the ecosystem. Each can influence its health.

That distinction matters to me. I cannot ensure that everyone I love grows in the direction I would choose. I cannot prevent every storm. I cannot repair every damaged branch. I can pay attention to the conditions I help create.

I can ask:

• Does knowledge move through our family, or is it held in isolation?
• Do the younger ones know where they come from without feeling trapped by it?
• Do the older ones remain valued when they can no longer contribute in familiar ways?
• Is support reciprocal enough to remain healthy?
• Can each person belong without having to become the same kind of tree?

These are not questions with permanent answers. Healthy systems are not static. They require observation, adaptation and care.

What I hope to pass on

When I imagine the botanical farm I have been walking towards, I often see the visible things first: healthy soil, medicinal plants, trees, animals, places for learning and a verandah from which to watch the landscape change.

But beneath that vision is another kind of inheritance.

I want to create conditions in which knowledge is shared rather than guarded; where science and lived experience can sit at the same table; where ageing is understood as an accumulation of value rather than a disappearance from usefulness; and where the next generation is supported to grow beyond us.

Perhaps that is what I am cultivating already.

My mother and father remain my origin trees. My grandparents live in the deeper soil of the family, even where I know only fragments of their stories. My siblings grow alongside me, each responding to life in a different way. My son has rooted himself in the Australian ecosystem we began together, and my grandson is its newest growth. My daughter may one day carry part of that living inheritance into another ecosystem of her own. And I am learning to inhabit my season—not as the youngest growth, and not yet as the oldest tree, but as a daughter becoming part of the canopy.

There is humility in this position.

I did not create the soil from which I grew. I cannot dictate where every seed will land. I can only tend the ground within my reach, keep the pathways of knowledge open, and offer what nourishment I genuinely have to give.

One day, perhaps, someone younger will look towards me as one of their origin trees.

By then, I hope the record of my life will not be measured only by what I built for myself, but by what was able to grow around me—and by what continued growing elsewhere.

A note on the science

Suzanne Simard and her colleagues demonstrated that carbon can move between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field, contributing to a much richer scientific and public conversation about forest interdependence. Researchers continue to debate how widespread these common mycorrhizal networks are, how resources move through them, and whether popular accounts overstate intentional cooperation or the special role of so-called “mother trees.” The metaphor in this essay is therefore an invitation to think relationally, not a claim that trees organise family life as humans do.

Further reading:

• Suzanne W. Simard et al., ⁠“Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field”, Nature 388, 579–582 (1997).
• Nils Henriksson et al., “Re-examining the evidence for the mother tree hypothesis”⁠, New Phytologist (2023).
• Suzanne Simard, research and publications⁠.