I am currently reading a fascinating book about trees and forests, and how similar they are with animals in their need to survive and procreate. The internet seems to think that there are many aspects of the book that seem like pseudo-science, with insufficient research to back up some findings, which may be true. Regardless, it has opened up my mind to the wonderful world of flora around us, the need to preserve ancient forests and prevent monocultures from taking over.
In particular, I found these 2 points really interesting:
Forests behave like 1 organism, and the trees within a forest are communistic in nature
A forest needs to protect itself from the elements, preserve a cool microclimate to avoid precious water from evaporating, protect itself from predators, and ensure the longevity of the forest, through procreation.
Trees do the above by growing thick crowns of foliage that soak up the sun, and shield young trees from strong winds. In addition, forests have evolved a “wood wide web”, a network of fungi that touch all trees within a forest, and act as a way for trees to not only communicate signals to one other, but also supply nutrients to each other. This way, even if a tree is old and failing, it does not necessarily die, but survives through nutrients being passed through the fungi system underground.
I had thought that the survival of the fittest would also apply here to trees, similar to the rest of the world. But it seems that trees would rather optimise globally at the forest level, rather than at an individual tree level. It’s more important for the forest to survive as a whole, as defense mechanisms against the weather only apply if the forest doesn’t have gaps in the canopy. So although an individual tree is healthy and could potentially grow even taller and broader if it wanted to, it siphons off some of it’s own nutrients to assist other trees – for the greater good.
Interestingly, this does not seem to play out when trees are planted by humans for the express purpose of generating timber. The trees are harvested every 100 years or so, that doesn’t leave enough time for the forest to get interconnected like this. As a result, the planted forests are much weaker than the naturally evolved ones.
Mother trees stunt the growth of baby trees so that they have a strong foundation built before growing up
I found this super fascinating. Apparently, baby trees are confined to grow at a very slow rate under the shade of the mother tree for many decades (aka “a string upbringing”), and does not have access to much sunlight. This sounds harsh, but is actually designed to help trees build up a strong bark and base structure, so that when they do get the chance to grow, they are able to withstand strong winds. In addition, the baby trees are on such a sparse diet of nutrients that the leaves they do put up are bitter and not as tasty as adult trees. This helps them from being eaten by hungry herbivores, who find the adult trees’ leaves too hard to reach. Only after the mother tree’s death do the child trees have enough space and sunlight to grow.
There’s plenty to learn from our wise friends, the trees.
Go together to go sustainably. Go slow to go far.
Shweta Padmanaban 