The Hidden Life of Trees

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.”

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 roots of forest trees don’t actually grow very deep

lovingly cared for and watered

Every fall, their roots are trimmed

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

water

shoots up the trunk with such force that if you place a stethoscope against the

tree, you can actually hear it.

but there are different levels of membership. For example, most stumps rot away into humus and disappear within a couple of hundred years (which is not very long for a tree). Only a few individuals are kept alive over the centuries, like the mossy “stones” I’ve just described. What’s the difference? Do tree societies have second-class citizens just like human societies? It seems they do, though the idea of “class” doesn’t quite fit. It is rather the degree of connection—or maybe even affection—that decides how helpful a tree’s colleagues will be