The man who thinks trees talk to each other
Beech trees are bullies and willows are loners, says
forester Peter Wohlleben, author of a new book claiming that trees have
personalities and communicate via a below-ground ‘woodwide web’
Tim Lusher
Mon 12 Sep 2016 16.46 BST Last modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017
04.28 GMT
Trees have friends, feel loneliness, scream with pain and
communicate underground via the “woodwide web”. Some act as parents and good
neighbours. Others do more than just throw shade – they’re brutal bullies to
rival species. The young ones take risks with their drinking and leaf-dropping
then remember the hard lessons from their mistakes. It’s a hard-knock life.
A book called The Hidden Life of Trees is not an obvious
bestseller but it’s easy to see the popular appeal of German forester Peter
Wohlleben’s claims – they are so anthropomorphic. Certainly, a walk in the park
feels different when you imagine the network of roots crackling with sappy chat
beneath your feet. We don’t know the half of what’s going on underground and
beneath the bark, he says: “We have been looking at nature for the last 100
years like [it is] a machine.”
There’s a touchy-feely warmth to the book – an “ouch!” when
he describes trees having branches hacked, roots cut or being gnawed by insects
– and he talks about “brainlike things” going on in trees that enable them to
learn over their long lifetimes. He points to scientific research – by Aachen
University, the University of British Columbia and the Max Planck Society –
that he claims underpins all his vivid descriptions, but he writes as a
conservationist and admits that much is still unknown. “It’s very hard to find
out what trees are communicating when they feel well,” he says.
Wohlleben – it translates as “Livewell” – has developed his
thinking over the past decade while watching the powerful but self-interested
survival system of the ancient beech forest he manages in the Eifel mountains
of western Germany. “The thing that surprised me most is how social trees are.
I stumbled over an old stump one day and saw that it was still living although
it was 400 or 500 years old, without any green leaf. Every living being needs
nutrition. The only explanation was that it was supported by the neighbour
trees via the roots with a sugar solution. As a forester, I learned that trees
are competitors that struggle against each other, for light, for space, and
there I saw that it’s just vice versa. Trees are very interested in keeping
every member of this community alive.”
The key to it, he says, is the so-called woodwide web –
trees message their distress in electrical signals via their roots and across
fungi networks (“like our nerve system”) to others nearby when they are under
attack. By the same means, they feed stricken trees, nurture some saplings
(their “most beloved child”) and restrict others to keep the community strong.
“Trees may recognise with their roots who are their friends,
who are their families, where their kids are. Then they may also recognise
trees that are not so welcome. There are some stumps in these old beech reservations
that are alive, and there are some that are rotten, which obviously have had no
contact with the roots of supporting neighbours. So perhaps they are like
hermits.” It sounds like living in a small village – as he does, in Hümmel,
near the Belgian border.
He writes about the unforgiving woodland etiquette – no one
likes a showoff who crowds everyone out and hogs the resources. When trees
break the rules, you end up with a “drunken forest”. He describes “upright
members of ancient forests … This is what a mature, well-behaved deciduous tree
looks like. It has a ramrod-straight trunk with a regular, orderly arrangement
of wood fibres.”
In Wohlleben’s analysis, it’s almost as if trees have
feelings and character. “We think about plants being robotic, following a
genetic code. Plants and trees always have a choice about what to do. Trees are
able to decide, have memories and even different characters. There are perhaps
nicer guys and bad guys.”
So which are good, bad and sad? Beeches and oaks form
forests that last for thousands of years because they act like families, he
says. Trees are tribal (“They are genetically as far away from each other as
you and a goldfish”) and ruthlessly protect their own kind: “Beeches harass new
species such as oak to such an extent that they weaken.” Douglas fir and spruce
also bond within their species.
Willows are loners. “The seeds fly far away from other
trees, many kilometres. The trees grow fast and don’t live very long. They are
like Usain Bolt – always the first, then they can’t breathe any more after 100
years and then they are gone.” Poplars aren’t social either and “a birch will
wipe other trees away so it has more space for its crown. That doesn’t sound
very nice but I think birch has no other choice because that’s what it’s grown
like because of its genes.” City trees are like street kids – isolated and
struggling against the odds without strong roots.
Wohlleben, 52, used to work as a state forester, viewing
trees as lumber, then began running survival training courses and log-cabin
tours. Since 2006, he has managed the forest on behalf of the community,
banning machinery and selling burial plots with trees as living gravestones.
His book became a bestseller in Germany last year, charting higher than memoirs
by the pope and former chancellor Helmut Schmidt. His accessible, chatty style
made him a hit on TV chatshows but he doesn’t want to be seen as a tree
whisperer, telling the Frankfurter Allgemeine: “I don’t hug trees and I don’t
talk to them.”
He talks about wood as “tree bones” and burns it for fuel at
the forest home he shares with his wife, Miriam, where they grow their own
vegetables and corn, and keep horses and goats. Every 15 minutes as we talk
over Skype, we break off as an old German oak clock chimes loudly. (“I bought
it on eBay. It had been in an English country house for over 100 years.”)
He talks about the natural world admiringly, wondrously
even, but unsentimentally. “The question for me is not should we use any living
being but just how to deal with them.” He wants us to cut down our wood
consumption and enjoy trees more – he describes them as “plant elephants”. Have
we lost our connection with the natural world? “No, I don’t think so. Perhaps
we have a little distance because scientists over the last 200 years have
taught us that nature works without soul.”
The Hidden Life of Trees, What They Feel, How They
Communicate by Peter Wohlleben is published by Greystone Books. To order it for
£13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free
UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Audiobook also available.
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