Enchanted Wood

The collective and collaborative behaviour of trees, brought to vivid life

TREES THAT care for their old and dying and nurse their young, like humans. Trees that signal danger to their species as clearly as a chital call. Trees that politely wait for centuries to grow up, until their parent generation falls to wind and weather. Peter Wohlleben’s book is filled with such wonders. Working as a capitalist forester in Germany, he was taught to regard a forest as lumber to be culled for profit. But the forest, as we know from the experiences of sages and saints, offers transcendental insight. Its trees gave Wohleben evidence of signalling, mutuality and perhaps even the human traits of motivation and altruism.

The English title of his book, The Hidden Life of Trees, unfortunately recalls The Secret Life of Plants, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s outrageous bestseller of 1973, which marked the apogee of pseudoscience in botany. Its claims about botanical psychology, inspired by lie detector tests run on plants by a former CIA interrogator, swayed the gullible public so powerfully that the scientific community felt impelled to issue warnings.

Wohlleben skates close to thin ice himself, but never falls in. To be fair, it is almost impossible to write about the magic of life in a lay diction without waxing mystical at times. Unlike the questionable laboratory experiments which brought notoriety to The Secret Life of Plants, Wohlleben arrives at his insight from observing nature in vivo. What he took for a formation of rocks turned out to be the remains of a giant tree-stump, vibrant green, though the tree was struck down centuries ago. Since it had not photosynthesised since then, Wohlleben concluded that it was being pumped with nutrients by other trees. This is credible, since the root systems of trees are much bigger than the canopies and intermesh underground. They are further connected by mycorrhizae, fungal networks that enmesh all things underground.

Both the author and Pradip Kishen, who has introduced the book and is India’s most popular authority on trees, attribute the discovery of this fungal signalling and regulatory apparatus to the 1990s, though it has been known and its mutualism acknowledged from the 19th century. But both writers bring the collective and collaborative — but perhaps not anthropomorphic — behaviour of trees to vivid life. Though an unknown, cold-blooded Darwinian calculus may be the actuator, rather than altruism, PETER WOHLLEBEN Penguin/allen Lane 319 pages ` 499 groves and forests seem to operate as colonies or compound organisms rather than individuals.

Wohlleben appeals powerfully to the reader’s sense of wonder. He shows that trees do not just stand there, as we imagine. They lead slowly busy lives. Phototropism and geotropism, which orient seedling for life, may be driven by simple hormonal transport mechanisms but in the long term, they are as effective as proprioception, the animal instinct which prevents you from falling off your chair and causes a cat to land on its feet every time.

While humans take journeys one step at a time, trees do it one generation at a time. Forests walk by using the wind, insects, animals and birds to broadcast their seeds to virgin territory, and Wohlleben reminds us that they are smart enough to control these agents, as well as to manage the complex energetics and rationing of resources involved in flowering and seeding. They know when to flower because they tell the seasons by measuring the daylight hours, like pre-industrial humans.

Among all anthropomorphic traits, trees’ need for community is the most engaging. Kishen writes that solitary sal trees die before their time. Wohlleben notes that cultivars seem to have forgotten their social instincts, and need human protection. These are astonishing observations, each a strong argument for rejecting artificial afforestation and returning forest lands to the wild.