William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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      This eBook edition published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

      Originally published in Germany as Das geheime Leben der Bäume. Was sie fühlen, wie sie kommunizieren. Die Entdeckung einer verborgenen Welt. By Peter Wohlleben © 2015 by Ludwig Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany.

      The Hidden Life of Trees first published in the English language by Greystone Books Ltd in 2016, Vancouver, Canada.

      English translation copyright © 2016 by Jane Billinghurst

      Foreword copyright © 2016 by Tim Flannery ‘Note from a Forest Scientist’ copyright © 2016 by Dr. Suzanne Simard

      Peter Wohlleben asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Copyediting by Shirarose Wilensky

      Jacket and interior design by Nayeli Jimenez Jacket and interior illustrations by Briana Garelli

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008218430

      Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008218447 Version: 2017-07-24

       TABLE OF CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Foreword by Tim Flannery

       Introduction to the English Edition

       Introduction

1 / Friendships

2 / The Language of Trees

3 / Social Security

4 / Love

5 / The Tree Lottery

6 / Slowly Does It

7 / Forest Etiquette

8 / Tree School

9 / United We Stand, Divided We Fall

10 / The Mysteries of Moving Water

       11 / Trees Aging Gracefully

       12 / Mighty Oak or Mighty Wimp?

       13 / Specialists

       14 / Tree or Not Tree?

       15 / In the Realm of Darkness

       16 / Carbon Dioxide Vacuums

       17 / Woody Climate Control

       18 / The Forest as Water Pump

       19 / Yours or Mine?

       20 / Community Housing Projects

       21 / Mother Ships of Biodiversity

       22 / Hibernation

       23 / A Sense of Time

       24 / A Question of Character

       25 / The Sick Tree

       26 / Let There Be Light

       27 / Street Kids

       28 / Burnout

       29 / Destination North!

       30 / Tough Customers

       31 / Turbulent Times

       32 / Immigrants

       33 / Healthy Forest Air

       34 / Why Is the Forest Green?

       35 / Set Free

       36 / More Than Just a Commodity

       Note from a Forest Scientist by Dr. Suzanne Simard

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD

      WE 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.

      One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That’s 115 times longer than the average human lifetime. Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one third of an inch per second. But why, you might ask, do trees pass electrical impulses through their tissues at all?

      The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and

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