The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World in Around the World in 80 Books

May 30, 2019 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it liked it

Shelves: theme-nature, author-man, a-reviewed, z-read-2019, landscape-forest

I was prepared to love this book. It’s got all the ingredients I’ve liked in Isabella Tree’s Wilding and in Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s Extraordinary Insects. The author - with the lovely surname of Wohlleben = well-living - is a forester and I was looking forward to lots of first-hand experience. To be fair, the book does have that but to me, the prose style grated. Perhaps because Wohlleben is a forester before he is a writer? The translation itself, by Jane Billinghurst, is superb.

So what was it I was prepared to love this book. It’s got all the ingredients I’ve liked in Isabella Tree’s Wilding and in Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s Extraordinary Insects. The author - with the lovely surname of Wohlleben = well-living - is a forester and I was looking forward to lots of first-hand experience. To be fair, the book does have that but to me, the prose style grated. Perhaps because Wohlleben is a forester before he is a writer? The translation itself, by Jane Billinghurst, is superb.

So what was it about the style? There is a lot of cutesy naming of plants - young plants as “youngsters” or “rascals”, mature trees as “mothers”. I personally don’t enjoy this kind of anthropomorphising in my nature non-fiction. Then there was a tendency to dramatise life by pitting the trees against insects, fungi and each other. There was a language of “attack” and of migrant interlopers, of fight to the death- I do think this is an effect of inexperienced writing because at the end of the book, the author pleads (as do all other nature writers) for leaving the forest be, for respecting the interconnectedness of nature and for not singling out individual species for conservation. But the bulk of the book keeps replaying these life-or-death dramas.

There is also quite a bit of repetition, and a colloquial address more suited to a blog, with “heys” and “hms” sprinkled on the page.

There is one irritating thing about the translation: it’s all in Fahrenheit and feet. As temperature plays quite a role in the book, this is very frustrating! Would it really have hurt to include both Fahrenheit and Celsius? Especially as the cover proudly proclaims that it’s an “international” bestseller.

I bought the English translation because it was £21 cheaper than the German original. It also has a foreword by Australian eco-activist Tim Flannery and an afterword by Canadian forest scientist Suzanne Simard, the person who discovered the mycorrhizal fungal root network of the “woodwide web” in the 1990s, a discovery that blew my mind when I first read about it in Wilding.

Format: WilliamCollins paperback. Nice white cover with tree drawing and tree drawings inside as well, by Briana Garelli. The spine is stiff and the book wo’t lie flat, causing muscle strain and cracks in the spine. The font is clear, the paper a bit rough.
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Aug 29, 2021 Wendy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-i-own, non-fiction, audiobook, 2021, nature

4.5 stars.

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Jun 03, 2022 Andy Plonka rated it really liked it

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This book gives new meaning to the phrase "Talk to the trees". It is amazing how smart trees are though it has taken humans quite a while to figure out their language. This book should be read by everyone. Not only can they communicate with other life forms but if you listen to what they have to say, you can learn a lot from them. ...more

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