Birch talks to Fir: How Forest Trees Share Information

[Bruce Tolley]

Here is a GREAT TED talk by a Canadian scientist about how and why forest trees exchange information
https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other/up-next
Watch it and learn something new.

[Eric Blumensaadt]

Yep, saw this a few months ago. Strange but evidently true. I guess there are all kinds of “languages” still to be discovered by humans.

[d k]

The following is one of the most fascinating, mind-blowing books about the natural world I’ve read.  It’s somewhat anthropomorphized, but does have hard scientific data backing up the more romanticized language.  You’ll never look at a forest the same way again.  (Since the author is German, for some reason I heard the book being read in my head by the voice of Werner Herzog! 😂)

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate-Discoveries-Secret-ebook/dp/B01C9116AK

The author and the person doing the Ted talk collaborated on a short documentary on this subject also, I believe (Intelligent Trees).

 

https://intelligenttrees.vhx.tv/packages/intelligent-trees/videos/intelligenttrees-engl-09-20-16

[Ethan A.]

Thank you Bruce and d k for sharing these. I think anyone who has spent enough time wandering in forests has a sense that there’s a lot more going on than a collection of individual trees.

I’ll add: The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web – In London’s Epping Forest, a scientist named Merlin eavesdrops on trees’ underground conversations.

 

 

[Bruce Tolley]

Ethan,

As an undergraduate I took three courses from a guy named Ken Thimann who discovered the first plant hormone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_V._Thimann

As a botanist and microbiologist who had documented hormone function and behavior in trees, when he talked about the dynamism of web of life in the 1970s, he actually could show the science and physiology of the interconnection.  He also taught a course called plants and human affairs that started with the hunter gatherers, the discovery of agriculture with rice, maize and wheat to modern times with the the botanical quests that accompanied the 18th and 19C European voyages of discovery to modern times with the the threats to climate and biodiversity caused by monocrops and over-industrialized agriculture.

But he did not believe in talking to plants. :-))

[jscott]

+1 on the Hidden Life of Trees; just mind opening and not woo woo at all. Science based. And a highly entertaining read!

[Ethan A.]

Bruce,  Thimann sounds like a researcher who was way ahead of his time. These are the types of classes and teachers that stay with you.

[Author]

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