Quotes from “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben

fairy tales of trees with human faces, trees that can talk, and sometimes walk.

Life in the slow lane is clearly not always dull.

fairy tales of trees with human faces, trees that can talk, and sometimes walk.

The trees don’t want to take anything away from each other, and so they develop sturdy branches only at the outer edges of their crowns, that is to say, only in the direction of “non-friends.”

One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old

READ IN fairy tales of trees with human faces, trees that can talk, and sometimes walk. This enchanted forest is the kind of place, I feel sure, that Peter Wohlleben inhabits. His deep understanding of the lives of trees, reached through decades of careful observation and study, reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you, too.

the epitome of frugality

the die is cast.

tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate.

good example of an organism that doesn’t like a lot of change is the freshwater snail. Depending on the species, it is often less than 0.08 inches long, and it loves cold water. They like it to be no more than 46 degrees Fahrenheit, and for some freshwater snails the reason for this lies in their past: their ancestors lived in the meltwater that drained off the glaciers covering a large part of Europe in the last ice age.

The researchers looked at about 700,000 trees on every continent around the world. The surprising result: the older the tree, the more quickly it grows. Trees with trunks 3 feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees that were only half as wide.42 So, in the case of trees, being old doesn’t mean being weak, bowed, and fragile. Quite the opposite, it means being full of energy and highly productive. This means elders are markedly more productive than young whippersnappers, and when it comes to climate change, they are important allies for human beings.

One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us.

Beeches harass other species, such as oaks, to such an extent that they weaken.

There is a honey fungus in Switzerland that covers almost 120 acres and is about a thousand years old.23 Another in Oregon is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends for 2,000 acres, and weighs 660 tons

mature beech tree can send more than 130 gallons of water a day coursing through its branches and leaves, and this is what it does as long as it can draw enough water up from below.

Every five years, a beech tree produces at least thirty thousand beechnuts (thanks to climate change, it now does this as often as every two or three years, but we’ll put that aside for the moment). It is sexually mature at about 80 to 150 years of age, depending on how much light it gets where it’s growing. Assuming it grows to be 400 years old, it can fruit at least sixty times and produce a total of about 1.8 million beechnuts. From these, exactly one will develop into a full-grown tree—and in forest terms, that is a high rate of success, similar to winning the lottery. All the other hopeful embryos are either eaten by animals or broken down into humus by fungi or bacteria.

rate of photosynthesis is the same for all the trees. The trees, it seems, are equalizing differences between the strong and the weak.

hen you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines

isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests

the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive.