Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer for Gardenista.
The rather startling subtitle of Peter Wohlleben’s popular book The Hidden Life of Trees is What They Feel, How They Communicate, Discoveries from a Secret World.
Here in the U.S. it spent 9 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and captured several awards including a 2017 Indie Choice Award given by independent booksellers for adult nonfiction book of the year.
At Llanover Gardens in South Wales: Acer nikoense, Carya cordiformis, 2 x Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Intertexta’, and Quercus pontica.
This club, which meets in an antique armory in Central Park, is appropriately known as the Garden and Forest Book Club and is presided over by Katherine Powis, a knowledgeable and genial horticulture librarian.
Oak trees in happy companionship.
I still think of Wohlleben when I see an isolated oak thriving in a open field or in the depleted soils of industrial agriculture.”
For more, see Hardscaping 101: Dry Stone Walls. Some of the more scientifically sophisticated members of the club did not care for what they took to be Wohlleben’s over-use of anthropomorphizing and thought his presentation of some of the scientific findings was a little weak.
Re-visiting the book eight months after my initial reading, I am pleased to find it even more engrossing.
For instance Dr. Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, has done ground breaking work on how trees communicate and cooperate via the web of fungi that connects their root systems.
A copper beech tree, at peace. In the case of trees in the forest, the “wood wide web” allows trees to share information about attacks by insects or other predators, to create consistent climate conditions, and to assist members of the community who are injured or otherwise impaired.
The Hidden Life of Trees is available for $16.96 in hardcover from Amazon.