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

by Peter Wohlleben

One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That’s

“wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi

encourage you to look around where you live. What dramas are being played out in wooded areas you can explore? How are commerce and survival balanced in the forests and woodlands you know?

Yellowstone National Park in the United States

wolves.

When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.

Scientists investigating similar situations have discovered that assistance may either be delivered remotely by fungal networks around the root tips—which facilitate nutrient exchange between trees1—or the roots themselves may be interconnected.2 In the case of the stump I had stumbled upon, I couldn’t find out what

forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.

together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to

Trees, it turns out, have a completely different way of communicating: they use scent.

pheromones

For if they can identify saliva, they must also

Willows produce the defensive compound salicylic acid, which works in much the same way. But not on us. Salicylic acid is a precursor of aspirin, and tea made from willow bark can relieve headaches and bring down fevers. Such defense mechanisms, of course, take time. Therefore, a combined approach is crucially important for arboreal early-warning systems.

This is because a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it. And

TREES MAINTAIN AN inner balance. They budget their strength carefully, and they must be economical with energy so that they can meet all their needs.

Yoga pose

about 1.8 million beechnuts. From these, exactly one will develop into a full-grown tree—and in forest terms, that is a high rate of success, similar to winning the lottery.

Deep down inside, do trees secretly appreciate beauty?

stability.

pine is the conifer with the highest rate of breakage because of snow.

cambium (the life-giving layer under the bark):

fungus’s underground cottony web, known as mycelium,

Capillary action is what makes the surface of your coffee stand a few fractions of an inch higher than the edge of your cup.

transpiration. In the warmer part of the year, leaves and needles transpire by steadily

osmosis

Each of us sheds about 0.05 ounces of skin cells a day, which adds up to about a pound a year. The numbers are impressive: 10 billion particles flake off us every day.

You can estimate the age of beech forests

from quite a distance: the higher the green growth is up the trunk, the older the trees.

“stork nest crown.”

“It’s no skin off an old oak’s back if a wild boar wants to use its bark as a scratching post.”

Spruce

coppicing.

the roots are the most important part of a tree.

There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.

so carbon stores in the ground below trees in our latitudes are being depleted as fast as they are being formed.40

the older the tree, the more quickly it grows. Trees with trunks 3 feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees that were only half as wide.42

Deciduous

terpenes,

It takes a beaver one night to bring down a 3-to-4-inch-thick tree. Larger trees are felled over the course of multiple work shifts. What

chaffinches.

animals,

aphids

Caterpillars

honey fungus mushroom,

Contrary to popular opinion, the birds don’t restrict themselves to rotten

wood. Wood fibers conduct sound particularly well, which is why they are used to make musical instruments

tree. And this explains why it is so important to keep old trees. If they are cleared away, these little black guys can’t just wander over to the next tree; they simply don’t have the energy to do that.

“nurse-log reproduction”

phytoncides

air in young pine forests is almost germfree, thanks to the phytoncides released by the needles.

cambium, that narrow layer of clear cells between the bark and the wood, grows new woody cells on the inside and new bark cells on the outside. If