The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben: book review

The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World (2015) is the tree version of the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird – the book that started other ‘Secret Life of’ books. But this book is not part of that series.

The author Peter Wohlleben was a forester in the Eifel mountains of the Rhineland municipality in Germany for over 20 years. The forest he managed included spruce, beeches, oaks, and pines. In this book he includes other trees, such as birches and aspens.

Wohlleben begins with the statement that trees are social beings. They share food with their own species, they communicate through scent, they register pain, and they have their own form of defence. He writes of reproduction, gender, age and aging, skin, soil, health, regeneration, hibernation, and a lot more. He writes about insects and birds and animals and humans – and how they all need trees.

His theories of the ‘wood wide web’ and the ‘symbiotic community of the forest’ is interesting and easily explained. Trees are, he says, the ‘motherships of biodiversity.’ He also asks the question, ‘Is living the same as being alive?’ For Wohlleben the term ‘living’ is passive, while the term ‘being alive’ in active.

Just as many individuals make a community, ‘many trees make a forest.’ And in telling the the story of the forest tree community, Wohlleben explains the life and death of trees, and everything in between. It’s quite fascinating.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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