62 pages • 2 hours read
Peter WohllebenThe Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Peter Wohlleben
Peter Wohlleben is a German author and forestry expert. He is the author of numerous successful books about nature including The Inner Life of Animals and Walks in the Wild. Wohlleben worked as a professional forester in Germany for many years, where he managed a forest in the Eifel mountains. He now runs his own forestry academy in Germany called Wohlleben’s Waldakademie.
Wohlleben’s background in forestry lends The Hidden Life of Trees more credibility, especially since he combines his own opinions with other scientists’ research. He brings his expertise and personal anecdotes to his work; his direct observations of tree life in the Eifel mountains enliven his work and help create a vivid picture of forest phenomena for the reader. Wohlleben was trained as a forester in the 1980s in Germany and, through his own experiences working in forestry, has come to adopt a different approach to silviculture than the conventional methods he was taught. In addition to educating the reader about how trees and forests function, Wohlleben also uses this book as an opportunity to persuade the public that there are ethical and unethical approaches to forestry, and that silviculture methods should respect the way trees instinctively want to grow, communicate, and reproduce.
Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard is a Canadian scientist and professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Simard’s discovery that tree roots use fungal networks to share nutrients and communicate messages is referenced multiple times in Wohlleben’s work. The symbiotic relationship between fungi and tree roots is a major aspect of The Hidden Life of Trees, which examines how trees develop these relationships with certain species of fungi and the significant benefits these networks provide for both the tree and the fungi.
Dr. Simard is the author of Finding the Mother Tree and has also produced research on “mother” trees which have extensive connections in the forest and provide substantial support to other trees. Wohlleben also refers to these studies when analyzing how trees influence their offspring through their root and fungal connections.
Dr. Monica Gagliano
Dr. Monica Gagliano is a professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the Southern Cross University in Australia. Her work is cited in The Hidden Life of Trees as evidence that plants are capable of learning and storing information. Wohlleben refers to Dr. Gagliano’s study on mimosa plants, which showed that they could register the sensation of water droplets on their leaves and learn over time that the water was not threatening. Wohlleben uses this information to enhance his argument that trees are also capable of learning and can somehow store their knowledge for long term use.
Wohlleben also cites Dr. Gagliano’s study on grain seedlings which showed that they could register the crackling noises made by other plants and pointed their roots in that direction. He extrapolates on this finding to suggest that perhaps trees can also register each other’s sounds, for example the noises they make when they are dangerously thirsty.
