The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World

Wohlleben begins his first chapter by reminiscing on how he once found living remains of tree trunks in the forest where he works. He was surprised to find these tree parts still alive, since they were clearly hundreds of years old, and the rest of the trees had long since rotted into humus, or the organic part of soil formed by decomposition. Wohlleben explains that tree’s cells require sugar to stay alive, and that trees provide their cells with this necessary nutrient through photosynthesis. Since they no longer had branches and leaves, these tree stumps could not perform photosynthesis, but instead managed to stay alive because of neighboring trees, who sent nutrients to them through their root systems.

Wohlleben reports that other forestry scientists have discovered that trees can transfer nutrients from root to root using either “fungal systems” or by physically intertwining their roots together (2). To illustrate his point he compares forests to ant hills, where each member is working hard to contribute to the health of the whole “superorganism” (2). These connections are far from random or accidental. The author credits Massimo Maffei with the argument that trees “are capable of distinguishing their own roots from roots of other species and even from the roots of related individuals” (3).