[dmix]

This was the specific quote from the article:

> In later experiments, we’ve been pursuing whether these older trees can recognize kin, whether the seedling that are regenerating around them are of the same kin, whether they’re offspring or not, and whether they can favor those seedlings — and we found that they can. That’s how we came up with the term “mother tree,” because they’re the biggest, oldest trees, and we know that they can nurture their own kin.

It seems that Kevin Beiler was the one who did research about this so that may be a good place to start rather than the author.

But whenever reading something like this quote below, where it's clearly a useful narrative for funding and public support, I find it's always good to be skeptical about how far that analogy extends:

> We’ve got a lot of interest from First Nations groups in British Columbia because this idea of mother trees and the nurturing of new generations very much fits with First Nations’ world view.