So why might our beech feel lonely? It is, I’d guess, the only tree of its kind for many kilometres along this windy coast. He offers a totally new insight and empathy towards the life of trees. But Wohlleben is thoroughly reasoning, well-sourced and persuasive. In less impressive hands, some New Age fancy might not be far away. Wohlleben presents his forest as a company of friends, self-aware and feeling, collaborative and with a guiding memory bank stored underground. Research on the exchange of nutrients finds links that go beyond the same species to apparent and deliberate assistance of “neighbours in need”. Exploring new tree science led him to decide that the surrounding beeches were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive.Įxistence of the “Wood Wide Web”, an underground network of fungi that links the roots of separate trees and lets them communicate chemically and “socially”, has been well established and debated since the 1990s. It was here he discovered the green life of chlorophyll in stone-like remains of an enormous, ancient stump. Wohlleben manages a protected forest of native beeches in the Eifel mountains of Germany. And two highly-regarded scientists give its pages an approving top and tail. John Banville was moved to review this warmly as “a book of marvels”, enriching any walk in a broadleaf wood.

That comes from reading The Hidden Life of Trees, by German forester and environmentalist Peter Wohlleben. Since we stole a small seedling from the floor of a forest, some 30 years ago, it has risen to a tree we can walk under, through a pool of summer shade.īut now, perhaps, we have to wonder if it’s lonely. The brilliant green of a new-fledged beech is, for me, the spring’s most beautiful colour, and the velvety sheen of its bark can be a sculptural delight. Beech doesn’t even start growing until there’s light for 13 hours of the day. It’s one way, I learn, that the tree measures day length, to time the explosion of emerald impounded at the bud’s core. And true enough, they were partly transparent, to let in the light. On tiptoe, I tugged a bud down and peeled off its coppery, protective scales. But thousands of new buds prick the sky, still slim and tightly wound but lengthening with every fine day. It bears a scant tatter of last year’s leaves, their winter glow quite faded. Our solitary beech is the last tree on the acre to burst into leaf, well after the native oaks and ash.

Lonely light game of thrones