One thing people don’t realise is, when you’re walking in the forest, there is a whole city underfoot that includes myriad organisms, including actinomycetes [bacteria] that excrete chemicals that can make us a bit high – there’s an aphrodisiac thing going on.

“Trees perceive many things. They know when they’re infected and have an instantaneous biochemical response. When we manipulate trees, they respond. Trees don’t have a brain, but the network in the soil is a neural network and the chemicals that move through it are the same as our neural transmitters.”

We love nature, don't we? but how much we care, whereas nature will always be known for its giving nature.

You know when it rains and you get that earthy smell? What happens is water gets into the soil and the bacteria burst – that’s what we’re smelling.” I don’t think romantic poets would have wanted to have hear about that, I say, and she laughs.

Simard lifts her phone high to show a sequence of spires, the dizzying perpendiculars of Douglas's firs, and to point out a “mother tree” – tallest in the forest, nurturing the smaller trees around it. She homes in on a cedar, then gestures at the under story – a tangle of sword fern, mosses, and hemlock