The Hidden Life of Trees Book Summary - The Hidden Life of Trees Book explained in key points

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The Hidden Life of Trees summary

Name: The Hidden Life of Trees
Rating: 4.7 (378 reviews)
Author: Peter Wohlleben

Peter Wohlleben

What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World

4.7 (378 ratings)

21 mins

Topics

Plants & Trees General Knowledge

Table of Contents

The Hidden Life of Trees
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Discover a hidden world.

A book about trees?! Those boring, green-and-brown things that do nothing but stand there? That, at best, provide some shade or a convenient place to hang a hammock?

Well, yes! Thing is, trees aren’t as boring as you might think. Or did you already know that they have their own kind of electric internet that enables them to warn friends and relatives, from miles away, about an insect attack? Or that, when there’s not enough nitrogen in the ground, they collaborate with fungi? Or that they have different personalities and choose when to shed their leaves?

You see, there is a lot to discover in the woods. In their million-year-long history, trees have developed astonishing abilities that help them in the lifelong struggle to secure water, light and nutrients. They have occupied the craziest ecological niches and have established friendships, antagonisms and alliances with every other possible living thing.

No one is better suited to tell you all this than Peter Wohlleben, who has spent his entire life among the trees. As a child, he already wanted to work in environmental protection, and now has worked for more than 30 years with trees. He practices a natural kind of forestry that is productive and humane – one that he’s honed with his unbelievable eye for detail and his immense factual knowledge. His awe of the woods and its inhabitants is legible in every line that he writes. In these blinks, join him on a walk through the forest that will put our green friends in an entirely new light.

These blinks also explain

what happens when aphids drink a tree’s blood;
how a mushroom can kill more living things than a shower of bombs;
how trees go to the toilet.

This is a Blinkist staff pick

“Everybody is talking about the secret lives of animals, but no one thinks about trees. As a forest-lover, these blinks fascinated me. I always knew there’s more to trees than what meets the eye.”

– Laura, German Editorial Lead at Blinkist

Our planet’s lungs: Trees play a vital role in global water and carbon dioxide cycles.

Before diving into the fascinating abilities of trees, let’s take a brief look at their general importance.

Humanity owes them a great deal: they clean the air we breathe and help ensure the availability of water, even in the world’s most remote locations. In fact, without trees humans would be unable to survive.

If there were no trees, large swathes of the earth would dry out. As you probably remember from school, the way the global water cycle works is that water evaporates from the oceans, condenses into clouds that blow onto dry land, where it then rains down and trickles into streams and rivers that flow back into the ocean.

However, this straightforward explanation omits one crucial fact: without trees, every cloud would rain down within 600 kilometers of the coast, leaving the inner parts of continents bone dry. Trees essentially act as gigantic water pumps, transporting water further inland. When it rains in a forest near the coast, much of the rain remains on the leaves of trees and the forest floor. This water then evaporates, forming new clouds that make their way further inland, where they rain down.

In addition to hydrating the inner reaches of continents, trees also clean the air of carbon dioxide, thereby protecting the climate. They gather CO2 from the air and store it, and when they die, some of this gas is re-released into the atmosphere, but much of it remains in the tree.

By burning these dead trees, whether in the form of coal or gas, we’re releasing this CO2 back into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. What’s more, we’re producing so much CO2 that the trees can’t keep up – they are unable to store it.

As you can see, without trees the earth and its climate would be much less hospitable to humanity.

These roots run deep: Trees interact in many different ways with the forest soil.

Trees aren’t only an essential part of our global climate; they’re also the basis for the soil in which we grow our food. And they interact with the earth’s soil in many different ways.

Surprisingly, the majority of the earth’s soil is comprised of trees. When our planet was formed, there wasn’t much around: there were minerals (for instance, cliffs and rocks), and air and water. Beaten by wind and rain, sections of these cliffs eroded and, over time, became a kind of gravel or sand. This is where single-celled organisms and algae settled.

A high rate of child mortality: Young trees live dangerous lives.

Without trees, we’d have no water to drink, only bad air to breathe and hardly any soil. High time, then, to get acquainted with our arboreal friends! What does the life of a tree look like?

Let’s start at the beginning of a tree’s life. Every type of tree follows a different reproductive strategy. Some have small seeds that are disseminated by the wind. Others, such as oaks and chestnut trees, have larger seeds, which are usually transported with the help of animals.

Nursery school: Trees have personalities and are able to learn.

Young trees don’t just grow; they develop a personality and, as the years pass, learn more about their environment and how they should best behave in it.

Personality, just as among people, varies among trees. Some are anxious, some bold. We tend to think of trees as doing nothing more than what we see them do. The weather turns cold, trees lose their leaves. Spring arrives, trees sprout buds and leaves. But it’s not that simple.

Chatterbox: Trees communicate in different ways, both with their own kind and with other creatures.

It’s good that trees can learn to cope with the threat of danger because they also like to talk about what they’ve learned. They do this in two ways: with scents and… with e-mail!

Trees can contact not only their own kind but also other creatures by using scent. Depending on the situation, they release different pheromones. They can be quite ingenious: when, for example, an elm tree or a Scots pine tree suffers a caterpillar infestation, the tree releases a scent that attracts a species of tiny wasp. These wasps fly to the affected tree and lay their eggs in the caterpillars; when these eggs hatch, the larvae attack and eat the caterpillars.

My friend the tree: Trees help one another.

Trees aren’t dumb. They are dependent on their ecosystems and conspecifics and can get in touch with them. No wonder, then, that they help each other out whenever there’s trouble.

Trees often warn their conspecifics of potential dangers, by using scent and the “fungi-internet.” Mostly, that works very well. For example, on the African Savanna, where giraffes like to eat umbrella acacias. Within minutes of this happening to an acacia, it will release poison in its leaves and, at the same time, emits a warning gas – ethanol – that alerts other trees within a 100-meter radius of the attack.

Lucky mushrooms: Trees intentionally work with fungi.

We already saw that trees use fungi to spread information in the forest. The fungi do this via their mycelium – a network of thread-like filaments. But that’s not all: trees and fungi work together on other levels, too.

For instance, they help each other procure water and nutrients, a collaboration that starts when a fungus lets a few filaments grow into the roots of the tree. Then the process gets started: the fungus helps the tree absorb more water. Sometimes the ground is rather dry, and the tree can’t get enough water with its roots alone. The filaments of the fungus are much finer, allowing them to permeate more ground, drawing water and nutrients and passing them on to “their” tree.

That hurts! Trees protect themselves from injury.

We’ve seen how trees warn each other when, for example, beetles, giraffes or, a bit closer to home, deer attack. The injuries that trees sustain during such attacks are painful – and so, quite naturally, they want to avoid them at any cost.

There are different types of injury that a tree can suffer. And a major inflictor of these injuries are, of course, animals: deer eat young shoots, woodpeckers peck holes into the trunk and bark beetles drill through the bark and eat almost all of the living wood.

Respect: Trees should be treated humanely, as animals are.

The image most people have of trees is dated. Unfortunately, the forestry industry is also behind the times. Traditional forestry, practiced almost everywhere in Germany today, does a few things wrong.

Of course, in the forestry industry, it’s mostly about producing wood. Foresters have long had a misconception: they thought that younger trees produce more wood faster than old trees. But this is untrue. Younger trees actually grow slower than older ones.

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What is The Hidden Life of Trees about?

Trees are engaged in countless complex cycles and they constantly struggle for water, light and their own survival. This struggle has led to some astonishing abilities: trees communicate with one another, give each other assistance, collaborate with fungi and other creatures, have memories and have even developed their own version of the internet!

Best quote from The Hidden Life of Trees

In one handful of forest soil there are more creatures than there are people on this planet.

—Peter Wohlleben

Who should read The Hidden Life of Trees?

Anyone who’d like to experience the woods in a very new way
Students of biology and ecosystems
People who work in farming or forestry, or who have their own garden

About the Author

Peter Wohlleben studied forestry and, for more than 20 years, worked in forest management. He quit his job to start his own forest enterprise in Germany’s Eifel region, where he championed alternative forestry and advocated for primeval forests. He has published multiple titles about forests and environmental protection, one of which is called Der Wald – Ein Nachruf (The Forest – An Obituary).

Categories with The Hidden Life of Trees

Nature & the Environment

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