Campfire Reads Review: The Hidden Life of Trees
“ I have learned… just how powerful a community of trees can be.”
Author: Peter Wohlleben
Goodreads Description: In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware.
I picked up this book because I am, admittedly, a little tree obsessed. If I had to choose between spending the weekend relaxing on the beach or hiking in the woods, I’d pick the woods every time. The only exception to this rule would be the Oregon coast because a lot of their beaches also have trees near them (note: Although I’d love to go to the Oregon coast, I’ve never actually been there, so the accuracy of this statement is tenuous at best).
If you’re also the kind of person who prefers trees to sand, you’ll probably enjoy The Hidden Life of Trees. For a book about trees, it reads more like an anthropological study than a biological one. The trees are quite often personified, and are described as having friendships, communities, and offspring. Like people, they work together for the common good of the forest. The stronger trees share nutrients with the weaker ones, improving the vitality of the forest as a whole. In the first chapter, Wohlleben describes finding part of a tree stump that should have been long dead, but as he peeled back the bark, he found a layer of something green.
“ Living cells must have food in the form of sugar…but without leaves –and therefore without photosynthesis– that’s impossible… It was clear that something else was happening with this stump.”
What Wohlleben discovered was that the neighboring trees were sharing sugar with the stump to keep it alive! This blew me away. It goes against everything I learned about natural selection in school, but Wohlleben explains that trees are not out only to protect themselves, but the forest ecosystem as a whole. In fact, he suggests that loner trees –trees that have been severed from a community due to deforestation or who were never part of a community to begin with– don’t live as long as trees in more established forests.
“[Lone trees] aren’t particularly long-lived. This is because a tree can only be as strong as the forest that surrounds it.”
Trees also apparently “talk” to each other. Forests have vast interconnected roots systems –or the “wood wide web”– that allow them to share information through fungi. Trees also emit gasses that other trees can “smell.” For example, if a tree is being infested with beetles, it can emit a warning gas so the other trees will shore up their own defenses.
According to Wohlleben, trees also have memories. A perfect example of this is the changing of the seasons:
“Rising temperatures mean it’s spring. Falling temperatures mean it’s fall. Trees are aware of that as well… And what this proves… is that trees must have a memory.”
As humans, we generally only associate memory with sentience, but Wohlleben seems to be suggesting that trees have other methods of storing information. Or maybe the trees actually ARE sentient and they can hear everything we say about them! (my words, not Wohlleben’s)
The Hidden Life of Trees is a good read for anyone who’s interested in trees but not maybe interested enough to become a professional arborist. I feel like that’s probably where most people reading this blog post fall. Any arborists reading this post probably stopped after the previous paragraph.
