The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World

by Peter Wohlleben

Apparently, the trees synchronize their performance so that they are all equally successful.

Whoever has an abundance of sugar hands some over; whoever is running short gets help. Once again, fungi are involved. Their enormous networks act as gigantic redistribution mechanisms. It’s a bit like the way social security systems operate to ensure individual members of society don’t fall too far behind.

But isn’t that how evolution works? you ask. The survival of the fittest? Trees would just shake their heads—or rather their crowns. Their well-being depends on their community, and when the supposedly feeble trees disappear, the others lose as well. When that happens, the forest is no longer a single closed unit. Hot sun and swirling winds can now penetrate to the forest floor and disrupt the moist, cool climate. Even strong trees get sick a lot over the course of their lives. When this happens, they depend on their weaker neighbors for support. If they are no longer there, then all it takes is what would once have been a harmless insect attack to seal the fate even of giants.

You find twice the amount of life-giving nitrogen and phosphorus in plants that cooperate with fungal partners than in plants that tap the soil with their roots alone.

Every year, a tree in its prime adds between 0.5 to 1 inch to its girth. Surely this would make the bark split? It should. To make sure that doesn’t happen, the giants constantly renew their skin while shedding enormous quantities of skin cells.

Part of the forest is used as an arboreal mortuary, where the trees are leased out as living gravestones for urns buried under them. To become part of the ancient forest after death—isn’t that a wonderful idea?

in Scotland, you can buy a piece of forest originally owned by the nobility to keep lumber companies out and help usher in the return of the ancient Caledonian Forest.