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Peter Wohlleben loves trees and wants us to love them too. I read this book because I wanted, in my quest of reading Pulitzer's, to more fully appreciate The Overstory and I knew this was a good way to get immersed. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate � Discoveries from a Secret World is a beautiful book about how trees communicate, what makes them unique in nature, and how man has impacted their development, their lifestyles and their evolution.

Now, the idea of trees "talking" will perhaps have some skeptics rolling their eyes, but the author makes a good case for how this is done via electrical impulses, chemical emissions from leaves, transmission of messages via fungi, etc. His passion for the subject is palpable: "Personally, I think the swirling cocktail of tree talk is the reason we enjoy being out in the forest so much. At least when we are out in undisturbed forests. Walkers who visit one of the ancient deciduous preserves in the forest I manage (in Germany) always report that their heart feels lighter and they feel right at home." (p. 223). He demonstrates that, in fact, there are no forests in Europe which are older than the 1600s due to the massive deforestation during the Middle Ages and to the end of the Renaissance when the population exploded and forests were converted into farmland to support the increasing demand for food and building materials.

What makes his study so fascinating is in how trees are so closely interlocked with other seemingly unrelated pieces of ecology: "Katsuhido Matsunaga, a marine chemist at the Hokkaido University, discovered that leaves falling into streams and rivers leak acids into the ocean that stimulate the growth of plankton, the first and most important building blocks in the food chain. More fish because of the forest? The researched encouraged the planting of more trees in coastal areas, which did, in fact, lead to higher yields for fisheries and oyster growers." (p. 245)

Wohelleben's greatest argument is for preserving forests for many reasons. One of which is soil preservation. In areas where trees have been planted over previously cultivated land (even if the farming was centuries before), a square mile of forest can lose 290 tons of soil due to rainstorms as opposed to only 1 to 14 tons in an undisturbed forest. (p. 87) And less soil, means less nutrition and fewer trees. And in the lost soil, "There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet." (p. 86). These include micro-organisms, fungi, and bacteria - an immense diversity. And speaking of diversity, he also mentions a study from 2009, when a researcher Dr Martin Gossner sprayed a 600 year-0ld, 51m tall tree with an insecticide and found "2041 animals belonging to 257 different species" (p. 132).

I have an aunt in Kentucky who made me aware of the horrible emerald ash borer and how all the ashes on her ranch (and indeed all the ashes in the eastern US) are being destroyed - this crisis having started in 2002 following the unintended introduction of the insect on wooden pallets from a Chinese importer (see the beautifully illustrated article . Wohlleben mentions a similar crisis, but due to a fungal virus, that destroyed Britain's ash trees. I wonder why nature suddenly decided it was time to try to eliminate the beautiful ash trees...

I truly loved reading this book and hope to share more time in the forest with my kids so that they can appreciate how important it is to preserve this critical piece of our ecological heritage. And, maybe I will convince my daughter of how sad it is for the conifer forest to have an amputated tree in our living room every Christmas when, in fact, this tree (now dying alone) would want to be back home with its familiars. I learned an enormous amount of things about tree habitats and characteristics and feel that I need to reread this book regularly to keep all the facts straight. And I need to finish the amazing The Overstory!