The hidden world that holds the forest together

Beneath a forest floor, a vast network threads through the soil, connecting the roots of trees, shuttling nutrients from one plant to another, and sometimes doing things that look uncomfortable like decision-making. This network is made of fungi — not mushrooms exactly, but the mycelial threads from which mushrooms fruit. Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, published in 2020, is a portrait of an entire kingdom of life that most of us have barely thought about.

Sheldrake, a biologist, argues that fungi dissolve our usual categories. They are neither plant nor animal. They digest food outside their bodies and absorb the result. They can be microscopic or the largest organisms ever recorded. Some have been found surviving in the vacuum of space. They made the colonisation of land by plant life possible — forming partnerships with the earliest land plants that persist, in modified form, in the roots of most plants alive today.

The book is especially good on mycorrhizal networks — the way fungi link trees in a forest, transferring carbon, water and minerals between them. Sheldrake is careful about the limits of this evidence: the language of 'wood wide web' and 'tree communication' can outrun what the science actually shows, and he flags this. But the underlying findings are real enough: plants are more connected, and more dependent on fungi, than most people imagine.

What gives Entangled Life its particular flavour is Sheldrake's willingness to sit with genuine strangeness. Fungi, he argues, force us to question what an individual organism is, what it means to have a body, and whether concepts like behaviour and sensing apply only to creatures with brains. The answers are less settled than we tend to assume.