Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

‘What interests me most,’ says Merlin, ‘is the understorey’s understory.’ He points around at the beech, the hornbeam, the chestnut. ‘All of these trees and bushes,’ he says, ‘are connected with one another below ground in ways we not only cannot see, but ways we have scarcely begun to understand.’ While studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge, Merlin read Simard’s groundbreaking research into the wood wide web. He also read E. I. Newman’s classic 1988 paper, ‘Mycorrhizal Links between Plants: Their Functioning and Ecological Significance’. There Newman argued against the assumption that ‘plants are physiologically separate from each other’, proposing instead the existence of a ‘mycelial network’ that might link plants together. ‘If this phenomenon is widespread,’ wrote Newman, ‘it could have profound implications for the functioning of ecosystems.’ Those ‘implications’ were indeed profound, and they fascinated Merlin. He already loved the alien realm of fungi. He knew that fungi could turn rocks to rubble, could move with swiftness both overground and underground, could reproduce horizontally, and digest food outside their bodies by means of metabolically ingenious excreted acids. He knew that their toxins could kill us, and their psychoactive chemicals could induce hallucinogenic states. The work of Simard and Newman, however, revealed to him that fungi could also allow plants to communicate with one another.