The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Can trees talk?
FORESTER PETER WOHLLEBEN ON WHAT CORONAVIRUS TEACHES US ABOUT LOOKING AFTER NATURE
THE way German forester Peter Wohlleben tells it, a key part of his journey began when he paused to look at an old stump. This was something he had passed many times while walking through the forest, but had always assumed was just a circle of moss covered stones. Then one day he bent down to take a look, and what he noticed was that under the moss was bark. He tried to lift the pieces of what he now thought were wood, and found they didn’t budge. He took a knife, thinned back the bark and found underneath a green layer that indicated the wood was still alive. The entire centre of the 5ft span of this circle had rotted away.
The tree, he calculated, must have been felled 400-500 years earlier. “We saw that it is still alive,” he recalls, “this old stump and without any green leaves.”
That this stump was still living made him look differently on the forest. “It brings up questions,” he says. “That living stump must have been burning sugar for centuries without a green leaf. That means that it
must get its energy from somewhere, and the solution was that the surrounding trees support this old stump through their root systems with sugar.” That stump still lives today. “It’s like a tree that has retired,” he says, ever poetic.
This revelation chimed with how many experts now view trees. “Some scientists,” Wohlleben observes. “now say that the real tree is underground, not above. It’s the roots system. The stem and the branches and the leaves are just the feeding organ of the tree, and the real tree and the brain like structures and so on are underground.”
THIS is classic Wohlleben, talking about trees with a vocabulary that makes them seem quite human. With The Hidden Life Of Trees, he has probably done more to change how the world sees trees than any other author. His book became a global publishing sensation, communicating and popularising a growing new understanding of trees that was coming to light through scientific research – the work, for instance, of Professor Suzanne Simard of University of British Columbia.
It articulated ideas that now increasingly inform how we look at forests – like the fact that trees, in a woodland, are linked to each other by a network of mycorrhizal fungi which carries messages and nutrients between them, a system some have called “the wood-wide web”. He wrote of tree “friends” that supported each other, of families, and even of “mother” trees that “suckle their young”.
While Wohlleben’s writing was based on sound scientific research, it spoke with rich wonder, in a language that was relatable. This year he has published a follow-up, written for children, which tells many of the same stories in a still more accessible way, and is partly based on the kind of conversations he would have with children when he would take them out on tours as part of the forest academy he and his son run. The book, an ideal read for days indoors during this current epidemic, has a teasing title, Can You Hear The Trees Talking?
He laughs when I ask if he talks to trees. “You can talk to trees. But I don’t think trees can understand you.” Rather, he says the title is a variation on a question he would often ask children when he took them on guided tours through the woods: “Are trees able to talk?”
To this, the children, he recalls, would often say, “No”. He would then reply, “Yes they can. But not with words like we do. With chemical words that are electro-signals like our internet. Trees are able to communicate in many different ways and scientists have found out hundreds of chemical words. For example trees are able to call predator for caterpillars which are feeding on their leaves’.”
We are talking, for this interview, with the help not of the wood-wide web, but of the world wide web. Wohlleben and I would have been meeting face to face, but instead, with our countries in coronavirus lockdown, he is sitting in his old forester house, surrounded by a large garden, host to 80 trees, which also backs onto a larger forest reserve in Germany’s Eifel region.
Even over Skype, I get a sense of his immense warmth and humour. It travels down the line.
Wohlleben says he has plenty to do during this lockdown, though the forest academy he runs there has cancelled all guided tours and seminars. “I have work enough for the rest of the year because I’m writing the next children’s book and my own magazine.”
He is also fortunate enough, in these difficult times, to hae easy access to forest and to the comforting company of trees. “The big advantage for me here is the trees are so close to my house.
We have now a clear blue sky and the trees are just ready to bring out new leaves. When you go out, you can’t feel other than happy. We have all this bad news at the moment and that’s really hard to stand, therefore it’s really good to go out. Even if it’s just for ten minutes to take a deep breath and look at the trees and look at how social they are, how slow they are, how old they can get. You see that different things matter than just if the economy will increase by some per cent.”
Among his favourite patch of forest is some “very old” beech woodland around 4km from his home. It’s part of the forest he manages, in an environmentally friendly way, on behalf of the local municipality. “We have a project there,” he says, “where every person can be part of 4 euro rent of the forest for 50 years and therefore the forest is protected from tree cutting. It’s a very wonderful forest. And for me, when I go through this forest, I feel at peace because I know that nothing could happen to these trees and so I can relax and listen.”
THE area Wohlleben looks after includes a burial wood, which is where he imagines his own remains will go in the end. “We set it up nearly 20 years ago. The first reason was to protect this old beech forest because otherwise it would have been felled.
The community which owns it was able to get the money from selling the old beech trees as living tombstones. That was the start of this burial forest. It’s the best symbol for the circle of life – that we are part of nature and after that our body goes back to nature.”
Even before he started to look more seriously at the science, Wohlleben, had a feeling that there was much more to trees than “being biorobots”.
He recalls: “Then I read scientific papers and the University of Aachen made studies here in the forest. I talked to scientists and visited them during their research. For example at the university of Bonn there’s a professor researching whether trees can feel pain and he says they do. It’s more than just a reflex.”
Though Wohlleben does have favourite trees, he says, in general what he loves is “trees where they belong”. “For example I love spruce trees in northern Sweden, or wonderful oak in Sherwood forest in England. I love every time I notice that trees feel well – and trees always feel well when they’re not in a plantation system.”
Wohlleben spent 20 years working for the forestry commission on such plantations, which cover large swathes of Scotland. Now an intense critic of the plantation system, he thinks of that former job as being like a “tree butcher”.
Among his concerns about plantations is that so often they involve the planting of non-natives. But also, he observes, that plantations don’t operate like healthy communities of trees, helping each other. They are lonely trees, isolated yet in a crowd – not connected in the same way through roots and fungal networks.
You don’t, for instance, get a living stump such as the one he mentioned earlier in a plantation. “These stumps only,” he says, “happen in unmanaged woodland. It’s like those plantation trees are lone wolves in a big crowd, because their root system is damaged. It looks like those trees aren’t able to connect properly any more.”
As a child, growing up in Germany’s former capital, Bonn, Wohlleben’s
You can talk to trees. But I don’t think trees can understand you