Portraits of a Neighborhood’s ‘Wood Wide Web’

Sometimes, mature douglas firs ship sugar to saplings by way of miles of underground, gossamer-thin mycorrhizal fungi. Through these identical passageways (the “Wood Wide Web”) birches can mortgage carbon to fir bushes in the summertime, whereas firs pay it again in fall. And bushes of totally different species may share nitrogen leached out of salmon carcasses left over from a bear’s lunch.

When the pandemic hit, photographer Andres Gonzalez retreated to his house in Vallejo, north of the San Francisco Bay. He began devouring novels, together with Richard Powers’ local weather epic The Overstory, which was impressed partly by the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s analysis on mycorrhizal networks. On lengthy walks, Gonzalez started photographing redwoods in his neighborhood. To him, the bushes, standing alone outdoors the braided forest, appeared sick and remoted. But he knew that even these suburbanite Sequoia sempervirens survived partially because of the prodigious webs between them, some instantly linked throughout adjoining lawns, and others, blocks aside, seemingly utilizing the foundation techniques of maples, laurels, yews—even ferns and herbs—as hyperlinks, lifelines beneath our manufactured world.

In January, Gonzalez’s 90-year-old grandmother examined optimistic for Covid. She was quickly hospitalized, and the physician really helpful that the household put together to say their goodbyes. Thirty of his grandmother’s saplings from Mexico to Sunnyvale gathered on Zoom, atoning, joking, praying. A nurse’s “blue latex fingers occasionally floated into the frame to touch her, the surrogate for all of us,” Gonzalez says. His grandmother survived. And now when Gonzalez thinks of the best way all of them pooled into her room by way of buried fiber optic, he additionally thinks of the best way remoted bushes aren’t actually remoted.