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

The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication.

takes the lesson to heart

radioactive cesium, which was found in soil even before the nuclear reactor disaster in Chernobyl in 1986, is mostly found in mushrooms.

Fungi are in between animals and plants. Their cell walls are made of chitin—a substance never found in plants—which makes them more like insects. In addition, they cannot photosynthesize and depend on organic connections with other living beings they can feed on.

Don’t parents want their offspring to become independent as quickly as possible? Trees, at least, would answer this question with a resounding no

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).

Birds that gobble the tart fruit make random deposits of seeds wrapped in their own little packages of fertilizer.

it takes no more than a few days for the seedling’s tasty new leaves to end up in the deer’s stomach.

TREES MAINTAIN AN inner balance.

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

The survival of the fittest? Trees would just shake their heads—or rather their crowns. Their well-being depends on their community, and when the supposedly feeble trees disappear, the others lose as well.

a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.

beeches are capable of friendship and go so far as to feed each other.

Whenever the seedlings’ roots were exposed to a crackling at 220 hertz, they oriented their tips in that direction. That means the grasses were registering this frequency, so it makes sense to say they “heard” it.

When I said at the beginning of this chapter that trees are definitely silent, the latest scientific research casts doubt even on this statement.