Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees

Page numbers in parentheses. Italics are my own questions of the text.

Chapter 11 Notes              Chapter 12 Notes    Chapter 13 Notes

Chapter 10 Notes             Chapter 9 Notes      Chapter 8 Notes

Chapter 7 Notes               Chapter 6 Notes      Chapter 5 Notes

Chapters 3 & 4 Notes      Chapter 2 Notes      Foreword, Introductions, and Chapter 1 Notes

Chapter 14 – Tree or Not Tree?

what is a tree? (79)

• dwarf trees on tundra

• 8 inches tall (80)

• (arctic shrubby birch)

• can grow 10 ft tall trunks

• mostly eye level

small beeches, mountain ash

• browsed on by mammals

• grow multiple shoots like bushes

stump?

• new stumps grow out of old stumps

• ‘coppicing’

• trees cut down to base of stump

• new trunks grow from base

• oak and hornbeam

• are those trunks now young trees? (81)

• or are they thousands of years old?

• oldest spruce in Dalarna

• flat shrubby growth around small single trunk

• carbon 14 dating = 9,550 years old!

root regrows trunk time and time again

• roots most important part of tree (82)

• equivalent of brain

• has to store experience somewhere

• most permanent part of tree

• where else would it store information?

can plants think? (83)

• frantisek baluska

• institute of cellular and molecular biology university of bonn

• brain like structure in root tips

• root feels its way through the ground

• aware of stimuli

• toxins

• stones

• saturated soil