The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben - Part 3

The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 130

  May 10, 2017 

Book 37 - The Hidden Life of Trees -
What they Feel, How they Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World
Peter Wohlleben (2015)
 Part 3 - pages 60-98
Reading Time - 1 hour

I have to admit, all these chapters get a bit overwhelming after a while. There is so much information! How trees age... what the bark means. Why some trees get really furrowed bark (like Douglas Fir) and why some bark remains smooth for a very long time (like Beech or Arbutus). I learned that trees in distress send out tonnes of anxious suckers at the base. Which makes me look at our old plum tree with some concern! I also wonder about our plum tree... it is a cultivated plum grafted onto wild rootstock. Which makes me wonder... is there a bit of a struggle going on between the root and the tree? Because the suckers that are coming up are all from the wild rootstock.

Old clonal tree - Sweden

Which leads to another question. What is a tree exactly? One shrubby Norway Spruce tree in Sweden is 9500 years old, with multiple little stalks. The tree in Sweden is not the world's oldest tree. It is the world's third oldest clonal tree "that has regenerated new trunks, branches and roots over millennia rather than an individual tree of great age."

 The underground part of the tree seems to be the most permanent... which makes one wonder if that is where experience and knowledge are stored. Do the electrical impulses in tree roots represent thoughts and intelligence?

The truth is... we know even less about the world underground than we do about the ocean (and we know precious little about the ocean!). Half of the biomass of a forest is in the soil, which is a crazy thought. There is so much life down there... and we have no idea about it.