Do Trees Talk to Each Other? [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Do Trees Talk to Each Other?
A controversial German forester says yes, and his ideas are shaking up the scientific world



A British Columbia rainforest, where Douglas firs soar more than 160 feet, supports 23 native tree species. (Diàna Markosian)

By Richard Grant, photographs by Diàna Markosian
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
MARCH 2018

I’m walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there’s a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They’re communicating with one another, for starters. They’re involved in tremendous struggles and death-defying dramas. To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks.

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It’s all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.

My guide here is a kind of tree whisperer. Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author, has a rare understanding of the inner life of trees, and is able to describe it in accessible, evocative language. He stands very tall and straight, like the trees he most admires, and on this cold, clear morning, the blue of his eyes precisely matches the blue of the sky. Wohlleben has devoted his life to the study and care of trees. He manages this forest as a nature reserve, and lives with his wife, Miriam, in a rustic cabin near the remote village of Hümmel.

Now, at the age of 53, he has become an unlikely publishing sensation. His book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, written at his wife’s insistence, sold more than 800,000 copies in Germany, and has now hit the best-seller lists in 11 other countries, including the United States and Canada. (Wohlleben has turned his attention to other living things as well, in his Inner Life of Animals, newly issued in translation.)

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/#52DUA8QaBMEhxAxf.99

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How Trees Secretly Talk to Each Other in the Forest

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What do trees talk about? In the Douglas fir forests of Canada, see how trees “talk” to each other by forming underground symbiotic relationships—called mycorrhizae—with fungi to relay stress signals and share resources with one another.

Read ‘Talking Trees’ in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine to learn more about the Douglas fir forests of Canada and the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

- video at link -

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/decoder/how-trees-secretly-talk-to-each-other-in-the-forest?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=WatchThis_20180907::rid=2015005599