Did you know:

1.Many trees have pretty shady parenting techniques (literally). Their offspring grow up closeby, under the shadows of their parents, so they can spend hundreds of years under their parents’ thumbs. It’s for their own good, of course, and in tree years, a hundred or so years isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things.

2.Trees can send out messages to one another via airmail (e.g. “DANGER! GIRAFFE ALERT! GIRAFFE ALERT! Inject your leaves with bitter tasting compounds!” or something along those lines – I don’t speak tree.)

3. Humans micromanaging the growth of new forests in order to allow them to become old growth forests in the future does more harm than letting nature do its course, the way we do it. (This appears to me rather obvious.)

AND SO MUCH MORE (under the cut).

Wohlleben – I keep thinking and typing “wollebaum” because baumwolle is cotton, and cotton broken down in German is, roughly, “wool tree”. And this book being about trees… – provides anecdotes from the very forest that he manages on top of citing work from studies done on the life of trees throughout the book, making for a light and accessible meandering into the subject. Each chapter is relatively short (a few pages long) and touches on related but separate topics, which left me hanging a couple of times throughout: for example, with respect to #2 above, I’m curious to know whether every species of tree sends out different chemicals, and whether every tree in the vicinity can interpret those messages even if they’re not the same species. Then there are the non-native insects and fungi: has that sort of movement actually been happening all the time, just much slower till now? These are not really within the scope set out for this book by Wohlleben, though, so rather than detracting from it, I would say they are actually a sign that The Hidden Life of Trees has done its job well!

So on that note, here are some more books about trees!

1. Or, more specifically, the life story of one Tree by David Suzuki.
2. The Global Forest discusses the role that forests play within the world, how forests work to affect the environment. It sounds like this would be a great follow-up to The Hidden Life of Trees.
3. If you’d like to try your hand at studying trees, Treecology should help get you started.
4. Crinkleroots’ Guide to Knowing the Trees also takes you through recognizing bark and leaves, and learning the relationships between different organisms living in the forest.
5. I Wonder Why Pine Trees Have Needles, and Other Questions About Forests will answer your questions one by one and teach you about the forest.
6. Here are some general search links if you would like to browse through our collection yourself: Trees – Ecology & Forests and Forestry

We also have books on trees in other languages!

1. El gran libro del árbol y sel bosque (Spanish)
2. Il Bosco (Italian)
3. Sofi v mire derev’ev (Russian)