The Hidden Life of Trees

What would you say if you met a man who told you that trees have feelings and experience pain?
That they communicate with other members of their species and support their young?

Chances are you’d smile indulgently and start patting your pockets for your car keys. What if he went on to say that trees have memory, hearing, language? That they can form circles of friends and ‘see’ colours . . . By now you’d have put on your quick, hard smile and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I really have to run.’

Right?

Wrong! You’d be a fool to go away! Here’s a book written by a woodsman that will disarm you with its gentle explanations and blow you away with new insights into the world of trees.

Forests are superorganisms with interconnections, much like ant colonies. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. – Peter Wohlleben, Forester and Author