See the Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Apple
Android
Windows Phone
Android
To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number.
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
As a young lad in Germany, Peter Wohlleben loved nature. He went to forestry school, and became a wood ranger. At this job, he was expected to produce as many high quality saw logs as possible, with maximum efficiency, by any means necessary. His tool kit included heavy machinery and pesticides. This was forest mining, an enterprise that ravaged the forest ecosystem and had no long-term future. He oversaw a plantation of trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced. It was a concentration camp for tree people.
Wohlleben is a smart and sensitive man, and over the course of decades he got to know the tree people very well. Eventually, his job became unbearable. Luckily, he made friends in the community of Hümmel, and was given permission to manage their forest in a less destructive manner. There is no more clear-cutting, and logs are removed by horse teams, not machines. In one portion of the forest, old trees are leased as living gravestones, where families can bury the ashes of kin. In this way, the forest generates income without murdering trees.
Wohlleben wrote The Hidden Life of Trees, a smash hit in Germany. It will be translated into 19 languages. The book is built on a foundation of reputable science, but it reads like grandpa chatting at fireside. He’s a gentle old storyteller explaining the wondrous magic of beautiful forests to befuddled space aliens from a crazy planet named Consume. He teaches readers about the family of life, a subject typically neglected in schools.
Evergreen trees have been around for 170 million years, and trees with leaves are 100 million years old. Until recently, trees lived very well without the assistance of a single professional forest manager. I’m serious! Forests are communities of tree people.Read more ›
4 Comments
160 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
The Hidden Life of Trees” is an amazing book presenting trees as sentient, purposeful beings living in dynamic relationship with each other. This is a new aspect for most of us, but apparently has been part of the secret knowledge of foresters since the early 1990’s. Trees, have a sense of time, have memories, taste, smell, feel, explore, see, and hear, but not like we do. Trees even move, from generation to generation just not as individuals. Trees live on a much slower time platform than we do. This single fact has hidden the true life of the trees from us.
“The Hidden Life of Trees” is carefully and well presented with humor, with gentleness, with compassion, with joy, even with love. The book is not a scientific, heavy fact laden tome. It is a very readable presentation of the last two decades of research into the lives of our follow beings on Earth, the Trees. The author is a German forester, environmentalist who obviously cares very much for his topic of choice.
The book was originally published in German in 2015 as “Das geheime Leben der Baume.” The translation is beautiful prose. Granted many of the examples are of the Central European forest. But there are many examples from our US forests as well.
I recommend this book to any one with a love for trees. But be prepared to revise your view of trees from objects to follow beings here on Earth.
4 Comments
108 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
I first read it in the original German; very pleased that it is now available.in English so that I can recommend it to friends and family here in he U.S. . It is a wonderful book by an author whose knowledge and gift as a writer makes it a wonderful read.
Comment
52 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Very interesting reading about the "wood wide web" of trees and that trees have different character. Peter Wohlleben explains "the process of a deciduous tree preparing for winter. If it drops its leaves too early, it loses valuable photosynthesizing and food production time. If it drops its leaves too late, it risks losing entire branches, made more vulnerable to high winds when in full leaf, in October and November storms. The problem of when to drop leaves is a “decision” that individual trees make differently. And considering that different trees very close to each other make the decision at various times, “the timing of the leaf drop, it seems, really is question of character.” Interesting reading about the social-ness of natural environment and makes us think more about our place on the earth.
Comment
37 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
![The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World by [Wohlleben, Peter]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51SWhMELe8L._SY346_.jpg)
If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, 