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

by Peter Wohlleben

The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication.

Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand.

As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they “smell” it and ...

Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producin...

The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be “tasted” by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that ...

Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlleben says, are thus rendered deaf and dumb.

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.

It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.

As a rule, trees in planted forests like these behave like loners and suffer from their isolation.

Salicylic acid is a precursor of aspirin, and tea made from willow bark can relieve headaches and bring down fevers.

Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.12 That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.

For the roots of seedlings not directly involved in the experiment reacted. Whenever the seedlings’ roots were exposed to a crackling at 220 hertz, they oriented their tips in that direction.

Scientists have determined that slow growth when the tree is young is a prerequisite if a tree is to live to a ripe old age.