The secret social life of trees

Peter Wohlleben spent decades managing a forest in the Eifel hills of Germany before he began to notice things that his training had not prepared him for — stumps kept alive for centuries by neighbouring trees feeding them sugar through their roots, beeches apparently nursing their sick companions back to health.

His book, published in German in 2015, proposes that trees are far from passive organisms. They send distress signals through fungal networks when attacked by insects, and neighbouring trees of the same species respond by producing defensive compounds. Wohlleben calls the underground fungal web a 'wood wide web'.

He describes how trees in a stand grow more slowly than isolated specimens, not because they are competing for light, but because they deliberately pace themselves to match the weakest member — keeping the canopy intact so the whole community can endure storms together.

The book became an unlikely global bestseller, translated into more than forty languages, because it offered readers a fundamentally different way of looking at a walk in the woods: not as scenery but as society.

Whether or not every claim holds up to scientific scrutiny, Wohlleben's core invitation is worth accepting — to slow down, look at a tree as something with a history and a neighbourhood, and reconsider what we mean by a living community.