Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees breaks entirely new ground. Wohlleben is a professional forester who works for the local community in Hümmel, a small village in the Eifel Mountains of western Germany. For years he managed the forest of beech, oak, pines, and spruce on conventional lines, felling the trees for their timber when they were mature and extracting the logs with heavy machinery. But gradually he came to look at the trees in a new light.
He writes, “Suddenly, I was aware of countless wonders I could hardly explain even to myself.”
Meanwhile new generations of scientists were exploring his local forest, including a team from Aachen University. And both there and in the university in Vancouver, five thousand miles away in British Columbia, discoveries were made that astounded Wohlleben.
What both teams discovered was nothing less than a vast underground network, called a mycorrhiza, in which fungi connect trees of different species by passing chemical and electrical signals among the trees’ roots. It was an arboreal Internet—christened the “wood wide web.” Trees could actually communicate by exchanging carbon through their roots. The exchange offered mutual support. Carbon is the food of trees, created by photosynthesis, using the leaves as solar panels. Sometimes one tree would act as mother to its neighbors, giving them more carbon than it received in return. Later the debt would be repaid as the roles were reversed.
As the subtleties of this underground network were explored, it became clear to scientists that trees not only benefited by mutual exchange of food. They exchanged vital information, warning their neighbors (and children) of threats and advising them of opportunities to seize. For example, if a tree’s leaves are bitten by a caterpillar, it will send a message though the mycorrhiza, prompting other trees in the network to release chemicals that repel caterpillars.
For Wohlleben these discoveries confirmed what he had come to recognize himself: that, in their own way, trees had feelings, that they knew how to communicate with one another, and that the strong were able to assist the weak. More here.