The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben - Part 1

The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 128

  May 8, 2017 

Book 37 - The Hidden Life of Trees -
What they Feel, How they Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World
Peter Wohlleben (2015)
 Part 1- pages vii-xv; 1-30
Reading Time - 1 hour

I've been wanting to read this book for over a year. I was on the Hold list at the library but... even though they had 33 copies, I was not moving up the list all that quickly. Not with 257 people ahead of me. So I broke down and bought the book.

The author of the book if a forester in Germany and, like many of us who worked in the forestry industry, knew very little about the hidden life of trees. Trees were mainly seen as lumber... the same way farmers see cows as beef steaks.

The foreword to the book introduces us to some of the wild and crazy things about trees that we don't know. Trees live on a different time scale than us. Many live for hundreds of years, some live for thousands of years. There is a tree in Sweden that is 9500 years old. Trees have electrical impulses that travel along their roots at the speed of 1/3" per second... very slowly indeed. But the presence of electrical impulses makes scientists think that it is a form of communication or intelligence. Trees can also release chemicals into the air when they sense danger (like bugs chewing on leaves). Other trees can smell/taste the chemicals and then alter the taste of their leaves to make them less appealing to the bugs (or to browsing herbivores). Tree roots are linked underground with an incomprehensibly huge fungi network. I knew a bit about this from last fall. My Mom and I had been out picking mushrooms and I did a big of research and learned that mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of an underground network of ultra-fine fungi tendrils that can extend over a vast territory. Mind-blowing! Through the fungi network (the wood-wide-web), trees can share food and also communicate with one another.

The book is structured in relatively short chapters that almost feel like stand-alone essays. In the first chapter we learn about an ancient tree stump that still had green bark around the outside. How could that be possible? It would appear that surrounding trees were keeping the old stump alive through the fungi networks. Forests aren't really composed of individual trees... rather they are a super-organism with some similarities to an ant colony. Many trees growing together create an ecosystem that moderates the extremes of heat and cold and also produces and conserves humidity. Each tree is valuable to the community, because if one tree dies, an opening in the canopy can lead to blow-down. So trees support each other when they are sick. On a sadder note... planted trees, or our urban trees, have usually had their roots damaged and never develop those supportive networks. They are essentially blind/deaf/dumb trees - and that is a sad thing.

Trees, as we learned above, can communicate via scent as well as electrical impulses (very slowly). There is also some intriguing research that suggests that trees can communicate via sound waves. I think, that the next time I go into the woods, I'm going to have a very different experience of the forest!