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One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old.
Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one third of an inch per second.
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.
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.
Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover.
Trees, it turns out, have a completely different way of communicating: they use scent.
When it comes to some species of insects, trees can accurately identify which bad guys they are up against.
The saliva of each species is different, and trees can match the saliva to the insect. Indeed, the match can be so precise that trees can release pheromones that summon specific beneficial predators.
The fact trees can recognize saliva is, incidentally, evidence for yet another skill they must have. For if they can identify saliva, they must also have a sense of taste.
a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Trees could have come up with this old craftsperson’s saying. And because they know this intuitively, they do not hesitate to help each other out.
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.
THIRST IS HARDER for trees to endure than hunger, because they can satisfy their hunger whenever they want. Like a baker who always has enough bread, a tree can satisfy a rumbling stomach right away using photosynthesis.
But even the best baker cannot bake without water, and the same goes for a tree: without moisture, food production stops.
the tree stockpiles water in winter.
when trees are really thirsty, they begin to scream. If you’re out in the forest, you won’t be able to hear them, because this all takes place at ultrasonic levels.
TREES ARE VERY social beings, and they help each other out.
fungi the largest known living organisms in the world.
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.
When you measure water pressure in trees, you find it is highest shortly before the leaves open up in the spring. At this time of year, water shoots up the trunk with such force that if you place a stethoscope against the tree, you can actually hear it.
Carbon 14 is a radioactive carbon that continuously forms in the atmosphere and then gradually decays.
The lower the amount of radioactive carbon it contains, the older the tissue must be.
The root is certainly a more decisive factor than what is growing above ground. After all, it is the root that looks after the survival of an organism. It is the root that has withstood severe changes in climatic conditions.
The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings.
Finally, the only other big difference
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Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals.
we know only a tiny fraction of what there is to know about the complex life that busies itself under our feet. Up to half the biomass of a forest is hidden in this lower story.
There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet. A mere teaspoonful contains many miles of fungal filaments. All these work the soil, transform it, and make it so valuable for the trees.
The researchers looked at about 700,000 trees on every continent around the world. The surprising result: 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.
So, in the case of trees, being old doesn’t mean being weak, bowed, and fragile. Quite the opposite, it means being full of energy and highly productive.
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 the beaver is after are twigs and small branches, which it uses for food.
Although beavers damage the forest around them, they exert a positive influence overall by regulating water supplies. And while they’re at it, they provide habitat for species adapted to large areas of standing water.
In total, a fifth of all animal and plant species—that’s about six thousand of the species we know about—depend on dead wood.
there are three species that drop their leaves like deciduous trees—the larch, the bald cypress, and the dawn redwood.
FOREST AIR IS the epitome of healthy air.
The air truly is considerably cleaner under the trees, because the trees act as huge air filters. Their leaves and needles hang in a steady breeze, catching large and small particles as they float by.
