"The Heartbeat of Trees," by Peter Wohlleben - A Review

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams 

Burrowing into Book

“The Heartbeat of Trees”

September 6, 2021

 

“What blood is to people, water is to trees.”

                                                                                                                            Peter Wohlleben (1964 -)

                                                                                                                            The Heartbeat of Trees, 2021

 

This is the third book by Peter Wohlleben I have reviewed – The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) on January 14, 2017, and The Inner Life of Animals (2016) on August 14, 2018 – his first and second books. This is his ninth. In this he focuses more on climate change and our need to preserve forests, which absorb carbon dioxide. While he fascinates, he comes across as a bit of a scold, though he ends with a measure of hope not despair. I don’t want to be too critical, as he has much to teach, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

 

He writes, for example, of a single spruce seed that fell to the ground 9,500 years ago in the mountains of Sweden. The seed germinated and the tree that was born, “Old Tjikko,” survives today – the oldest known tree on the planet. It has seen the extinction of mammoths and the emergence of man from the Stone Age. Since its birth, he writes: “The climate had fluctuated from cold to warm and back again multiple times, but, unaffected by any of this, the spruce was still standing intact today in the place where it had been born.” 

 

As in his past books, Mr. Wohlleben is captivated by similarities between plants and animals, and the connection of humans with nature and the adaptability of the latter. He writes of the need for conservation, that “…with every step we take to help conserve the ecosystem that is the earth, we are at the same time protecting ourselves…”

 

In a chapter on forest bathing, a practice new to me but one that emerged in Japan in the 1980s (shinrin-yoku), he writes of going into the woods with his family for a picnic, walking through a deciduous stand of trees: “We lay there under the trees for one, maybe two hours…We chatted and relaxed and forgot time. And that is forest bathing. For me it was the most beautiful day in the forest that I can remember.” Take a moment, he tells us, to just sit on a stump or a log, which will bring one closer to the feel of the forest. He leaves us with hope: “It is by no means too late to protect nature. We are much too tightly bound to it.” 

 

The adaptability of nature fascinates him. He writes of the bog orchid, which grows in the north and has no bees to serve as pollinators; so, has learned to imitate the smell of humans to attract mosquitoes, which then serve as pollinators. And he writes of a vine that grows in South America that adapts to the tree it is climbing, even to imitating its leaves. If water is to a tree what blood is to us, how does it get from the roots to branches dozens of feet above the ground? The answer, he tells us, is a barely noticeable pump action. Researchers “determined that a tree’s trunk sometimes shrinks by about 0.0002 inches before expanding again.” That is the heartbeat of trees. Mr. Wohlleben is passionate about his forests, as his story attests. 

 

The woods are a good place to gain perspective. This book adds to our appreciation. Walking beneath “the elephants of the plant world,” we realize we are a small part of a large natural world, with its opportunities for us and of our responsibility to it.