The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben - Part 5

The Hidden Life of Trees -
Peter Wohlleben

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 132

  May 12, 2017 

Book 37 - The Hidden Life of Trees -
What they Feel, How they Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World
Peter Wohlleben (2015)
 Part 5 - pages 147-199
Reading Time - 1 hour

Do individual trees have character? Good question... The author talks about a cluster of three oaks that grew in the same conditions but behaved very differently. One tree would turn colour much earlier in the fall than the other two. It was a more "sensible" tree, hedging its bets and not courting the disaster of an early frost. Interesting.

The author also laments what he calls the "street kids" of trees. These are trees that were introduced into Europe from the New World - things like redwoods and spruce. They were planted in parks and were pampered by being watered. But they had no parents and grew too quickly. There roots were shallow and they were surrounded by other types of trees. When the watering stopped... the trees were in trouble.

Trees generally have great tolerance for climatic variability. When seeds are set, they are set for the conditions of that year. So if it's a drought year, the little seeds are prepped to be drought tolerant. Which means that even though trees can belong to the same species, they can have a high genetic variability. Some might deal better with drought (cause they were set in a drought year) whereas others might deal better with cold (cause the seeds were set in a cold year).