The unexpected skills of the trees
The other day in some bookstore: hungry for new reading material Christopher and me are browsing through the non-fiction shelves. There’s almost no book which couldn’t appease our hunger. Having picked thirty books, only six of them find their way in our bookshelf at home. Today we present one of them:
The secret of the trees: What they feel, how they communicate – the discovery of a hidden world. From Peter Wohlleben, published in 2015 by Ludwig. No english version available yet.
During the reading we hover on our little balcony-boat, surrounded by mediterranean plants and herbs, immersed in the pages and lines of the books. Every now and then we throw little „did you know that…!“-bites at each other, while the branches of the ash in the backyard are swaying in the wind like sea anemones.
The german forest ranger Peter Wohlleben reveals a fascinating view of the world of trees to us. By his own experience and following latest scientific findings, Wohlleben vividly and entertaining tells us about beech-trees supporting weak colleagues, sniveling oaks and also about the biggest living things on earth: fungi, which at the same time form the forests intelligent „wood wide web“.
We learn that trees feel pain, exchange messages and have a memory. We become aware of the fact that different creatures live in different temporal dimensions. For a tree we may seem like a mayfly, which in turn considers us motionless giants.
„Das geheime Leben der Bäume“ makes a good read, almost like a detective story. It draws a bow from the seedling to the trees death, covering all the arboreal fears and needs in between. A wonderful illuminativ treehouse read!
[…] of their neighbours and offspring? In their current movie „Intelligent Trees“ forest ranger Peter Wohlleben and forest scientist Suzanne Simard are looking for answers for this kind of questions […]