What is the best way to save nature – to cordon off areas for parks and open space or to integrate conservation measures on working lands? Recent research makes a case for each of these approaches and has reignited a long-standing debate among scientists and conservationists.
JBC is pleased to have been a part of the Sasaki team for this project. (from Cleveland Magazine)
The University Circle Inc. president tells us how the space
connects the Hough neighborhood and University Circle.
Colorful colonials, white picket fences and wraparound
porches line the Hough neighborhood’s Newton Avenue. The quaint road between
East 101st Street and East 97th Street is one of Chris Ronayne’s favorites, but
something about streets like Newton, Logan Court, Woodward Avenue and Lamont
Avenue bothers him.
“It’s a very curious thing that our street infrastructure in
an urban grid is chock-full of cul-de-sacs in the Hough neighborhood,” says the
president of University Circle Inc. “Something was designed by intent, which
seemed to create an insular mobility pattern. It doesn’t square with me.”
To Hough residents, those dead-end streets — along with a
steep, unruly landscape and a wall of back-of-the-house architecture along
Martin Luther King Jr. Drive on Case Western Reserve University’s southern
campus — was a message: “Keep out.” But a few dozen steps away, Ronayne sees
the Nord Family Greenway as “a physical statement about our intentionality to
connect.”
Completed in June, the 15-acre green space links CWRU’s
Tinkham Veale University Center and the reformed 1920s-era temple that now
houses the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Running through the Cleveland Museum
of Art’s Fine Arts Garden, the 2,200-foot-long stretch of grass, trees, tiered
walkways and picnic areas expands a traditionally north-south campus to the
east and west. Designed by Sasaki, the $15 million landscape project is the
result of collaboration between the university, the art museum, the Cleveland
Foundation and principal donors Eric and Jane Nord.
But beyond a campus pathway and event space, the Greenway,
which replaces that inward-facing design, is an overdue welcoming of the Hough
neighborhood into University Circle’s cultural mecca.
“Right now places feel a world away that are only five
blocks away,” says Ronayne. “It’s on all of us if a kid within a mile of the
Circle has never experienced a Circle institution.”
Yet, truly embracing Hough means matching brick-and-mortar
efforts with social infrastructure. As examples, Ronayne mentions UCI’s Circle
Scholars, an after-school program where seventh- and eighth-graders visit the
museums and learn about local history from curators, or Future Connections, an
eight-week course that teaches career skills to local high school seniors.
“We’ve got open jobs in the field of nursing and too few
applicants,” he says. “We’d be remiss if we’re not locally teaching kids about
the job opportunities of tomorrow.”
Strolling past the Chinese Cultural Garden, which may soon
welcome more ethnic monuments as neighbors, the former Cleveland planning
director points back to the space between East 105th Street and those dead-end
Hough streets.
Ronayne hopes the Greenway eventually reaches past Maltz to
those streets. He also hopes to see the health care industry create hubs of
economic innovation — things like the forthcoming Cleveland Clinic and CWRU
dental clinic — in spaces like Mount Sinai.
“Now the next step is, ‘OK, I can get there, but now give me
a reason to go,’ ” Ronayne says. “Obviously culture is a reason, but how about
a job?”
Green Roofs are making a difference in Kansas City. JBC is pleased to have contributed to this new report.
The EPA is excited to introduce
a new case study demonstrating the environmental and health benefits of green
roofs in Kansas City, Missouri, Estimating the Environmental Effects of Green Roofs. The case study lays out a replicable
analytical framework that state and local decision makers can use to assess the
multiple benefits of green roofs, including stormwater runoff reductions and
public health improvements.
I’m in a redwood forest in Santa Cruz, California, taking
dictation for the trees outside my cabin. They speak constantly, even if
quietly, communicating above- and underground using sound, scents, signals, and
vibes. They’re naturally networking, connected with everything that exists,
including you.
Biologists, ecologists, foresters, and naturalists
increasingly argue that trees speak, and that humans can learn to hear this
language.
Many people struggle with this concept because they can’t
perceive that trees are interconnected, argues biologist George David Haskell
in his 2017 book The Songs of Trees. Connection in a network, Haskell says,
necessitates communication and breeds languages; understanding that nature is a
network is the first step in hearing trees talk.
For the average global citizen, living far from the forest,
that probably seems abstract to the point of absurdity. Haskell points readers
to the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador for practical guidance. To the Waorani
people living there, nature’s networked character and the idea of communication
among all living things seems obvious. In fact, the relationships between trees
and other lifeforms are reflected in Waorani language.
In Waorani, things are described not only by their general
type, but also by the other beings surrounding them. So, for example, any one
ceibo tree isn’t a “ceibo tree” but is “the ivy-wrapped ceibo,” and another is
“the mossy ceibo with black mushrooms.” In fact, anthropologists trying to
classify and translate Waorani words into English struggle because, Haskell
writes, “when pressed by interviewers, Waorani ‘could not bring themselves’ to
give individual names for what Westerners call ‘tree species’ without
describing ecological context such as the composition of the surrounding
vegetation.”
Because they relate to the trees as live beings with
intimate ties to surrounding people and other creatures, the Waorani aren’t
alarmed by the notion that a tree might scream when cut, or surprised that
harming a tree should cause trouble for humans. The lesson city-dwellers should
take from the Waorani, Haskell says, is that “dogmas of separation fragment the
community of life; they wall humans in a lonely room. We must ask the question:
‘can we find an ethic of full earthly belonging?’”
Haskell points out that throughout literary and musical
history there are references to the songs of trees, and the way they speak:
whispering pines, falling branches, crackling leaves, the steady hum buzzing
through the forest. Human artists have always known on a fundamental level that
trees talk, even if they don’t quite say they have a “language.”
Photo by Jeffrey L. Bruce
Redefining
communication
Tree language is a totally obvious concept to ecologist
Suzanne Simard, who has spent 30 years studying forests. In June 2016, she gave
a Ted Talk (which now has nearly 2.5 million views), called “How Trees Talk to
Each Other.”
Simard grew up in the forests of British Columbia in Canada,
studied forestry, and worked in the logging industry. She felt conflicted about
cutting down trees, and decided to return to school to study the science of
tree communication. Now, Simard teaches ecology at the University of British
Columbia-Vancouver and researches “below-ground fungal networks that connect
trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction,” she
says. As she explained to her Ted Talk audience:
I want to change the way you think about forests. You see,
underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways
that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave
as though it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of
intelligence.
Trees exchange chemicals with fungus, and send
seeds—essentially information packets—with wind, birds, bats, and other
visitors for delivery around the world. Simard specializes in the underground
relationships of trees. Her research shows that below the earth are vast
networks of roots working with fungi to move water, carbon, and nutrients among
trees of all species. These complex, symbiotic networks mimic human neural and
social networks. They even have mother trees at various centers, managing
information flow, and the interconnectedness helps a slew of live things fight
disease and survive together.
Simard argues that this exchange is communication, albeit in
a language alien to us. And there’s a lesson to be learned from how forests
relate, she says. There’s a lot of cooperation, rather than just competition
among and between species as was previously believed.
Peter Wohlleben came to a similar realization while working
his job managing an ancient birch forest in Germany. He told the Guardian he
started noticing trees had complex social lives after stumbling upon an old
stump still living after about 500 years, with no leaves. “Every living being
needs nutrition,” Wohlleben said. “The only explanation was that it was
supported by the neighbor trees via the roots with a sugar solution. As a
forester, I learned that trees are competitors that struggle against each
other, for light, for space, and there I saw that it’s just [the opposite].
Trees are very interested in keeping every member of this community alive.” He
believes that they, like humans, have family lives in addition to relationships
with other species. The discovery led him to write a book, The Hidden Life of
Trees.
By being aware of all living things’ inter-reliance, Simard
argues, humans can be wiser about maintaining mother trees who pass on wisdom
from one tree generation to the next. She believes it could lead to a more
sustainable commercial-wood industry: in a forest, a mother tree is connected
to hundreds of other trees, sending excess carbon through delicate networks to
seeds below ground, ensuring much greater seedling survival rates.
Foreign language
studies
Seedling survival is important to human beings because we
need trees. “The contributions of forests to the well-being of humankind are
extraordinarily vast and far-reaching,” according to the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization 2016 report on world forests (pdf).
Forests are key to combating rural poverty, ensuring food
security, providing livelihoods, supplying clean air and water, maintaining
biodiversity, and mitigating climate change, the FAO says. The agency reports
that progress is being made toward better worldwide forest conservation but
more must be done, given the importance of forests to human survival.
Most scientists—and trees—would no doubt agree that
conservation is key. Haskell believes that ecologically friendly policies would
naturally become a priority for people if we’d recognize that trees are masters
of connection and communication, managing complex networks that include us. He
calls trees “biology’s philosophers,” dialoguing over the ages, and offering up
a quiet wisdom. We should listen, the biologist says, because they know what
they’re talking about. Haskell writes, “Because they are not mobile, to thrive
they must know their particular locus on the Earth far better than any
wandering animal.” https://qz.com/1116991/a-biologist-believes-that-trees-speak-a-language-we-can-learn/
The gardener has a long, touchy-feely relationship with the
soil. As every good cultivator knows, you assess the earth by holding it. Is it
dark and crumbly, is there an earthworm or beetle in there, is it moist, and
when you smell it, are you getting that pleasant earthy aroma?
All these signs are reassuring, and have been through the
ages, but they are mere indicators of something much greater and infinitely
mysterious: a hidden universe beneath our feet. This cosmos is only now revealing itself as a result of
scientific discoveries based on better microscopic imaging and DNA analysis.
There is much still to learn, but it boils down to this: Plants nurture a whole
world of creatures in the soil that in return feed and protect the plants,
including and especially trees. It is a subterranean community that includes
worms, insects, mites, other arthropods you’ve never heard of, amoebas, and
fellow protozoa. The dominant organisms are bacteria and fungi. All these
players work together, sometimes by eating one another. The awareness of this biosphere should change the way
gardeners think about cultivating plants and heighten everyone’s understanding
of the natural world. In other words, don’t ever call it “dirt” again. The sheer vitality of it is mind-bending: A teaspoon of good
loam may contain a billion bacteria, yards of fungal strands, several thousand
protozoas and a few dozen nematodes, according to Jeff Lowenfels, a garden
writer based in Anchorage and co-author of “Teaming With Microbes.” This is, basically, how it works: Plants manufacture
carbohydrates through photosynthesis, but not just for themselves. They release
some of their carbon sugars into the soil, which causes the bacteria and fungi
to show up to feed. The bacteria crowd around the root zone, and the fungi form
vast networks of interlocking strands that often link one plant to another. The
bacteria convert nitrogen and other nutrients into forms the plants can use,
often by getting devoured by other microbes. The fungal strands, the mycelium, effectively increase the
root mass of its host plant by as much as a thousand times and transport a bevy
of goodies to the host plants, including phosphorus, copper, calcium and zinc.
There is also evidence that trees use this network to send signals to one
another if, say, leaf-eating pests have arrived. In his Ted Talk, mycologist Paul Stamets referred to
mycelium as “Earth’s natural Internet.”
Although some plant (and human) diseases are caused by
soil-borne fungi and bacteria, most of these microbes are beneficial and keep
the bad ones in check. The organisms assist in other ways, by increasing the
size of soil particles, which improves the ability of the soil to hold water
and air. Even in the middle of a city, the subterranean world is
thriving.
Scientists took almost 600 soil samples from across New
York’s Central Park and discovered a surprising diversity and richness. They
identified more than 120,000 types of bacteria and more than 40,000 species of
fungi, protozoa and arthropods. Among the unexpected findings: The microbial species were
the same, more or less, as those found in parts of the world with dramatically
different flora and climates from New York’s, including Antarctic cold deserts,
tropical forests and grasslands. There was a strong association between the diverse organisms
in each sample. “Unravelling these relationships will be critical to building a
more integrated understanding of below-ground ecology,” the researchers wrote
in a paper published by the journal for the British Royal Society. “Our work
highlights that most of the diversity found in soil remains undescribed.” Enough is known, however, to create a 21st-century subset of
farming known as regenerative agriculture. The farmers have discovered that if
you foster this biosphere, you don’t need expensive fertilizers because the
microbes repay the plants with nutrients. They also, for obvious reasons, avoid
pesticides that would kill this soil life. The farmers do as little soil digging as possible because
traditional tillage destroys the fungal networks and the desirable soil
structure. Cover crops keep the soil life happy between growing seasons. Advocates of this low-impact farming say it can restore soil
carbon lost by the historic conversion of forest and prairie to farmland and
help to mitigate greenhouse gases. In the 1990s, an Agricultural Research
Service scientist in Beltsville, Sara F. Wright, discovered a sticky coating to
fungal threads named glomalin that, it turns out, is a major reservoir for
carbon. Lowenfels says it’s also time for gardeners to adopt
practices that nurture the soil biosphere. To say he thinks deeply about this
subterranean world is an understatement. In addition to “Teaming With
Microbes,” he has written “Teaming With Nutrients.” His latest title is
“Teaming With Fungi,” which dwells on the type of fungi that directly associate
with plant roots. They are known as mycorrhizal fungi, and he’s a big fan of
adding them to his plants when they are installed, either as a spray or in
powdered form available from the garden center. “It works. My tomato plants are
bigger than the control, they’ve got more fruit on them, the plants are so
healthy,” he told me. “My carrots are unbelievable this year.” Some gardeners turn to compost tea to build soil microbes.
This is made by aerating sugars, compost and humic acids in non-chlorinated
water and then spraying the brew on plants and soil. Others are not convinced
that this is needed, though everyone agrees that the way to foster the soil
food web is to top-dress growing beds and lawns with organic matter such as
shredded leaves or finished compost. James Nardi, a biologist at the University of Illinois in
Urbana, offers this advice: “Work with your fellow non-human gardeners. I never
use synthetic fertilizers, and I never use pesticides.” Nardi’s 2007 book,
“Life in the Soil,” remains an excellent introduction to the subject. In the fall, he mixes horse manure with fallen leaves,
shreds the mixture and applies it as a mulch to his growing beds. “In the
spring, I have this lovely, spongy soil,” he said. Lowenfels shreds autumn
leaves on his lawn and lets the biosphere use them over the winter. The organic gardener’s mantra has never seemed more
appropriate. Feed the soil, not the plant. ● Earthworms: Earthworms (and other worms) play an important
role in the hidden biosphere. Most worm species in the garden were imported by
Old World settlers, and some worms in certain regions have caused a problem by
processing organic matter too efficiently. The latest culprit is a creature
called the Japanese crazy worm (Amynthas agrestis), which multiplies like, er,
crazy and damages the soil structure through mass feeding. It is long
established in parts of the Southeast but has spread recently to Wisconsin and
Illinois, where it is causing problems. But the European earthworms familiar to most gardeners are
helpful. Worms provide critical assistance to smaller organisms by
breaking down and incorporating leaves into the soil, so all may eat. Worm
castings are rich in nutrients, including calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus and
potassium. The most famous observer of earthworms, Charles Darwin,
estimated that they could add as much as 40 tons of casts per acre annually. ● Insects: Thousands of insects (and spiders) live in a
patch of soil. Some are considered pests by humans — Japanese beetle grubs,
termites and weevils, for example — but others are beloved or at least
beguiling and include the larvae of lightning bugs and cicadas. Dung beetles
convert animal waste into humus, a service we take for granted. Ants are the
most abundant soil insect. Although some species are pests or nurture pests
such as aphids, ants with their highly organized colonies are essential members
of the soil biosphere. They assist in the conversion of litter to humus, move
and mix large quantities of soil, and spread the seed of bulbs and other
desirable plants. ● Other arthropods: The more conspicuous of these include
millipedes and centipedes, as well as woodlice. Millipedes feed on plant debris
and microbes; centipedes eat other arthropods. Woodlice, or sowbugs, are
crustaceans that like soft plant debris and make quick work of green plant
material and newly fallen leaves. One of the most abundant, but barely visible, arthropods in
the soil are springtails. They are named for a tail-like structure that allows
them to jump when threatened. As many as a billion or more can live in an acre
of soil. Depending on species, they cycle plant debris or feed on fungi, algae
or other springtails. Mites are generally regarded by gardeners as pests, and some
are — sucking sap from plants and spreading disease. But the soil houses an
immense community of non-pest species that are essential to the cycle of life.
Half the known species of mites live in the soil, where they feed on decaying
plant litter. Nardi writes that they “set the stage for smaller decomposers
like bacteria and fungi to free most of the energy and nutrients stored in
those leaves.” Some mites are predatory and attack nematodes and other
small creatures. ● Nematodes: Nematodes are tiny wormlike creatures that have
traditionally been viewed in agriculture as serious pests that harm plants by
feeding on their roots. More recently, the view of nematodes has become more
nuanced because some species are now commonly used (and purchased) as predators
of garden pests such as slugs, vine weevils and white grubs, to name a few. In
truth, the world of nematodes is much greater and can only be imagined. Experts
believe there may be close to a million species, of which only a fraction have
been described scientifically. Some nematodes eat soil bacteria and fungi, while others
prefer to consume other soil arthropods and protozoa. Their value to the garden
is in converting nitrogen into a form that plants can use. ● Protozoa: Protozoa are microscopic creatures that live in
vast numbers in the film of water between soil particles. The most well-known
is the amoeba, but these microbes come in several forms, including species that
move with a single flagellum or with hair like cilia. They are the major predator of bacteria, and in consuming
them they release nitrogen and other nutrients to plants. Protozoa, in turn, are eaten by nematodes and other small
arthropods. ● Bacteria: Historically, bacteria have been associated with
germs. Some of the nastiest human diseases — anthrax, typhoid, tuberculosis and
syphilis, for example — are the result of bacterial infections. But we have
come to know too that our guts are full of beneficial bacteria and essential to
our health. The soil is the same way — the bad actors are outnumbered
and usually outwitted by the good ones. Healthy soil is loaded with bacteria,
and because they’re not very mobile, they tend to hang out in vast numbers on
and around the roots of plants, a zone known as the rhizosphere. There can be
as much as 100 times more bacteria around plant roots than elsewhere in the
soil, and with good reason. The plants feed them carbon sugars. The microbes
give back nitrogen.
● Fungi: Fungi break down organic matter, which is why you
will see mycelium strands in compost piles and under leaf litter. Two basic
forms of fungi form a symbiotic relationship with plants. One exists in
proximity to root tips and associates with hardwood trees and conifers. The
other penetrates the cell wall of the roots and is found in plants of the
domestic landscape — flowers, shrubs, grasses and vegetables.
The fungi grow tiny, fragile strands called hyphae. They are
a tenth the thickness of human hair, but there are so many of them that they
form a vast network, effectively extending the reach and efficiency of plant
roots. In her book “The Soil Will Save Us,” science writer Kristin Ohlson says
there can be as much as 320 miles of hyphae in a cubic foot of soil. At least
80 percent of the plants on Earth connect to these fungal partners.
“Gardeners need to know this stuff,” Lowenfels said. “A
thinking gardener is a better gardener.”
A dense carpet of woodland perennials. Thomas Rainer, a landscape architect, calls plants “social creatures” that thrive in particular networks. Credit Mark Baldwin
Thomas Rainer and
I have both been doing the botanical thing for decades; we know, and use, many
of the same plants — and even much of the same horticultural vocabulary. But
what he and I see when we look at a butterfly weed or a coneflower, or what we
mean when we say familiar words like “layering” or “ground cover,” is
surprisingly not synonymous.
It turns out I’ve
been missing what the plants were trying to tell me, failing to read botanical
body language and behavior that could help me put plants together in
combinations that would solve challenges that many of us have: beds that aren’t
quite working visually, and garden areas that don’t function without lots of
maintenance.
As we gardeners
shop the catalogs or the just-opening local garden centers with an eye to
finally “fixing” that bed out front that has never quite cooperated, I asked
Mr. Rainer, a landscape architect based in Washington, D.C., to lend us his 3-D
vision.
In his career, Mr. Rainer has
designed landscapes for the United States Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther
King Jr. Memorial and the New York Botanical Garden, as well as gardens from
Maine to Florida. He is an author with Claudia West of the 2015 book “Planting
in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes.”
He is a principal in the firm Rhodeside & Harwell, but will leave soon to
start a new firm with his wife, the landscape architect Melissa Rainer, and Ms.
West. He advocates an ecologically expressive aesthetic that interprets rather
than imitates nature.
Q. You visit a
lot of gardens, and probably hear from gardeners like me with beds that just
aren’t working. What’s the most common cause?
Traditional garden design often isolates plants, setting them “as individual objects in a sea of mulch,” Mr. Rainer said. “We place them in solitary confinement.” Credit Thomas Rainer
A. First, we have
to understand that plants are social creatures. Our garden plants evolved as
members of diverse social networks. Take a butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa,
named this year’s Perennial Plant of the Year by the industry
group the Perennial Plant Association), for example. The height of its flower
is exactly the height of the grasses it grows among. Its narrow leaves hug its
stems to efficiently emerge through a crowded mix. It has a taproot that drills
through the fibrous roots of grasses. Everything about that plant is a reaction
to its social network. And it is these social networks that make plantings so
resilient.
So if we think
about the way plants grow in the wild, it helps us understand how different our
gardens are. In the wild, every square inch of soil is covered with a mosaic of
interlocking plants, but in our gardens, we arrange plants as individual
objects in a sea of mulch. We place them in solitary confinement.
So if you want to
add butterfly weed to your garden, you might drift it in beds several feet
apart and tuck some low grasses in as companions, like prairie dropseed, blue
grama grass or buffalo grass.
Start by looking
for bare soil. It is everywhere in our gardens and landscapes. Even in beds
with shrubs in them, there are often large expanses of bare soil underneath.
It’s incredibly high-maintenance. It requires multiple applications of bark
mulch a year, pre-emergent herbicides and lots and lots of weeding.
The alternative
to mulch is green mulch — that is, plants. This includes a wide range of
herbaceous plants that cover soil, like clump-forming sedges, rhizomatous
strawberries or golden groundsel, and self-seeding columbine or woodland
poppies.
Intermingling plants can also foster more flowering plants in a smaller space.Credit Thomas Rainer
Q. If I want
to try to do it more as nature does, what am I aiming for? Where do I take my
cues?
A. The big shift
in horticulture in the next decade will be a shift from thinking about plants
as individual objects to communities of interrelated species. We think it’s
possible to create designed plant communities: stylized versions of naturally
occurring ones, adapted to work in our gardens and landscapes. This is not
ecological restoration, it’s a hybrid of ecology and horticulture. We take
inspiration from the layered structure in the wild, but combine it with the
legibility and design of horticulture. It is the best of both worlds: the
functionality and biodiversity of an ecological approach, but also the focus on
beauty, order and color that horticulture has given us. It’s possible to
balance diversity with legibility, ecology with aesthetics.
And it is a shift
in how we take care of our gardens: a focus on management, not maintenance.
When you plant in communities, you manage the entire plantings, not each
individual plant. This is a pretty radical shift. It’s O.K. if a plant
self-seeds around a bit, or if one plant becomes more dominant. As long as it
fits the aesthetic and functional goals. We can do much less and get more.
Q. Sort of
gives new meaning to the phrase “community garden,” doesn’t it?
A. Yes. And
plants each also have particular behavior — whether it wants to hang out with
other plants of its own species or not. So many gardening mistakes are a result
of not paying attention to this.
Q. You make
them sound like social animals, which makes me think I’ve been shallow,
objectifying plants — choosing among them for just another pretty face, instead
of reading their body language to get at their true nature.
A. One of the
most useful ideas that came out of our research was this German idea
of sociability, developed by Richard Hansen and Friedrich Stahl. They rank
a plant’s predilection to spread on a scale of 1 to 5. A low-sociability plant
is one that in the wild is almost always found by itself (Panicum virgatum, for
example, is almost always found by itself in a meadow). A high-sociability
plant is one that spreads into large colonies (Epimedium or Tiarella cordifolia
are Level 4 plants; Carex pensylvanica and Packera aurea are Level 5). You
arrange plants according to their sociability level: Plants of lower levels (1
and 2) are set individually or in small clusters. Plants of higher levels (3 to
5) are set in groups of 10 to 20-plus, arranged loosely around the others.
A meadow-like display of greenery on an urban deck designed by the HM White landscaping firm. Credit Aaron Booher
It sounds geeky,
ranking plants on a scale, but it’s useful because it informs which you should
mass, and which you should mingle. It’s why a mass of 50 echinacea (Level 2)
tends to flop. They’re just not meant to cover ground. But if you scatter a
handful of echinacea in a mass of prairie dropseed or sideoats grama, it will
look great.
For years, I
would pack together large grasses like switchgrass, or flowers like garden phlox
(both Level 1 plants) and wonder why they got rust or powdery mildew. But if
you find phlox in the wild, it will never have mildew. It’s growing out of a
lot of lower plants, so it gets good air circulation. This idea changed the way
I look at plants and pay attention to how they behave.
Q. I know that
nature doesn’t plop a 50-foot tree in a mowed lawn (or mow its lawn at all,
actually), so that’s not the winning design tactic. I also know that more
diverse layered designs are richer ecologically — and now you are saying they
are easier to manage, too. But how do I figure out how to fit the right plants
together?
A. We need to
start thinking about how, not what. So many garden books focus on what to
plant, but so few focus on how to arrange plants to fit together in ecological
combinations. When we fit our plants together like a tight jigsaw puzzle, the
maintenance goes way, way down. They start becoming resilient systems rather
than random objects.
To do this, we
need to pay attention to a plant’s shape. Its shape is often an indication of
where it grows in the vertical strata of a plant community. Upright plants with
low or minimal basal foliage like Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium) or spiky upright
plants like beargrass (Nolina bigelovii) have adapted to growing through other
plants. Horizontally spreading rhizomatous plants like Pennsylvania sedge
(Carex pensylvanica) or beach strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis) have adapted to
grow underneath others. You almost have to look at a plant from the vantage
point of a chipmunk to see its shape.
A grouping of plants by sociability: Foamflower (a very sociable Level 5) dominates, followed by wild ginger and trillium (Levels 2 to 3) and just a few ferns (more independent at Level 1). Credit John Roger Palmour
What I love about
this layering idea is that it gives gardeners flexibility. Those lower layers
should be very biodiverse: lots of different plants covering the ground and
providing stability. But diversity in this layer does not really look messy,
because most of these plants are growing underneath our taller ones, so you
don’t really see them.
In my garden, I
have a corner with dry shade where I have a handful of shrubs that screens a
busy road. Lately I’ve been adding white wood aster (Eurybia divaricata),
Appalachian barren strawberry (Geum fragarioides) and Pennsylvania sedge and
watching them fill the gaps. Upper layers, on the other hand, are the ones I
consider the “design” layers because they shape your impression of the
planting. You can arrange them naturalistically, or in neat clumps — whatever
style you like. That’s the flexibility: The order and legibility of the upper
layers combines with the diversity and functionality of the lower ones.
The really cool
thing is you can combine this layering idea with the sociability idea. Those
Level 1 and 2 sociability plants tend to be those taller upright plants you use
in the top layers of your garden because they like to grow through others. The
Level 3 to 5 plants tend to be your lower spreading ground-hugging species.
Q. So I am not
shopping for plants solely as decorative objects, but for plants with a purpose
— for instance, as a living mulch or a good companion to others. Of course none
of that, neither the “sociability” nor the plant’s layer, is on the plant
labels. A tag might say “for containers or landscapes” or that the plant is
“trailing” or “upright” or “mounding,” but that’s about it. What should the
label say to help me put plants together successfully?
A. My dream label
would describe things that are actually useful to understanding how it grows.
It would describe its shape, its root system (taprooted, deep fibrous roots,
shallow horizontal roots); its life span (a short-lived pioneer like columbine,
or a long-lasting lavender); its sociability level; its adaptation to stress
(quick-establishing, but short-lived ruderal species like Gaura lindheimeri or
Nassella tenuissima; a thuggish, fast-spreading competitor like Monarda didyma;
or a slow but steady stress-tolerator like Hosta or Calamintha). These are
really the factors that explain how it will grow in our gardens.
A. The Mt. Cuba Center, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
and the California Native Plant Society
websites all have excellent information about how a plant grows in the wild and
what it grows with. But mostly, I think gardeners can get to know their plants
by going outside and getting reacquainted. Take a look at their shape, how they
spread and see what they are trying to show you. You can learn a lot.
The tonic of the wilderness was Henry David Thoreau’s
classic prescription for civilization and its discontents, offered in the 1854
essay Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Now there’s scientific evidence supporting
eco-therapy. The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart
rate and blood pressure, reduce stress hormone production, boost the immune
system, and improve overall feelings of wellbeing.
Forest bathing—basically just being in the presence of
trees—became part of a national public health program in Japan in 1982 when the
forestry ministry coined the phrase shinrin-yoku and promoted topiary as
therapy. Nature appreciation—picnicking en masse under the cherry blossoms, for
example—is a national pastime in Japan, so forest bathing quickly took. The
environment’s wisdom has long been evident to the culture: Japan’s Zen masters
asked: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, does it make a sound?
To discover the answer, masters do nothing, and gain illumination.
Forest bathing works similarly: Just be with trees. No hiking, no counting
steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather
than accomplish anything.
“Don’t effort,” says Gregg Berman, a registered nurse,
wilderness expert, and certified forest bathing guide in California. He’s
leading a small group on the Big Trees Trail in Oakland one cool October
afternoon, barefoot among the redwoods. Berman tells the group—wearing
shoes—that the human nervous system is both of nature and attuned to it. Planes
roar overhead as the forest bathers wander slowly, quietly, under the green
cathedral of trees.
From 2004 to 2012, Japanese officials spent about $4 million
dollars studying the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing,
designating 48 therapy trails based on the results. Qing Li, a professor at
Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, measured the activity of human natural killer
(NK) cells in the immune system before and after exposure to the woods. These
cells provide rapid responses to viral-infected cells and respond to tumor
formation, and are associated with immune system health and cancer prevention.
In a 2009 study Li’s subjects showed significant increases in NK cell activity
in the week after a forest visit, and positive effects lasted a month following
each weekend in the woods.
This is due to various essential oils, generally called
phytoncide, found in wood, plants, and some fruit and vegetables, which trees
emit to protect themselves from germs and insects. Forest air doesn’t just feel
fresher and better—inhaling phytoncide seems to actually improve immune system
function.
Experiments on forest bathing conducted by the Center for
Environment, Health and Field Sciences in Japan’s Chiba University measured its
physiological effects on 280 subjects in their early 20s. The team measured the
subjects’ salivary cortisol (which increases with stress), blood pressure,
pulse rate, and heart rate variability during a day in the city and compared
those to the same biometrics taken during a day with a 30-minute forest visit.
“Forest environments promote lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse
rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower
sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments,” the study concluded.
In other words, being in nature made subjects,
physiologically, less amped. The parasympathetic nerve system controls the
body’s rest-and-digest system while the sympathetic nerve system governs
fight-or-flight responses. Subjects were more rested and less inclined to
stress after a forest bath.
Trees soothe the spirit too. A study on forest bathing’s
psychological effects surveyed 498 healthy volunteers, twice in a forest and
twice in control environments. The subjects showed significantly reduced
hostility and depression scores, coupled with increased liveliness, after
exposure to trees. “Accordingly,” the researchers wrote, “forest environments
can be viewed as therapeutic landscapes.”
Berman advised the forest bathers to pick up a rock,
put a problem in and drop it. “You can pick up your troubles again when you
leave,” he said with a straight face.
City dwellers can benefit from the effects of trees
with just a visit to the park. Brief exposure to greenery in urban environments
can relieve stress levels, and experts have recommended “doses of nature” as
part of treatment of attention disorders in children. What all of this evidence
suggests is we don’t seem to need a lot of exposure to gain from nature—but
regular contact appears to improve our immune system function and our
wellbeing.
Julia Plevin, a product designer and urban forest bather,
founded San Francisco’s 200-member Forest Bathing Club Meetup in 2014. They
gather monthly to escape technology. “It’s an immersive experience,” Plevin
explained to Quartz. “So much of our lives are spent interacting with 2D
screens. This is such a bummer because there’s a whole 3D world out there!
Forest bathing is a break from your phone and computer…from all that noise of
social media and email.”
Before we crossed the threshold into the woods in Oakland,
Berman advised the forest bathers to pick up a rock, put a problem in and drop
it. “You can pick up your troubles again when you leave,” he said with a
straight face. But after two hours of forest bathing, no one does.
Joy Chiu, a leadership and life coach on the forest bath led
by Berman, explained that this perspective on problems lasts long after a bath,
and that she returns to the peace of the forest when she’s far from here,
feeling harried. “It’s grounding and I go back to the calm feeling of being
here. It’s not like a time capsule, but something I can continually return to.” https://qz.com/804022/health-benefits-japanese-forest-bathing/?utm_source=atlfb
My dad is a wildlife biologist, and during road trips we took when I was growing up he spent a lot of time talking about the grasses and trees along the highway. It was a game he played, trying to correctly identify the passing greenery from the driver’s seat of a moving car. As a carsick-prone kid wedged into the back seat of a Ford F150, I found this supremely lame. As an adult—specifically, one who just spoke with a paleobotanist—I now know something about my father’s roadtripping habit: Identifying leaves isn’t easy.
“I’ve looked at tens of thousands of living and fossil leaves,” says that paleobotanist, Peter Wilf of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. “No one can remember what they all look like. It’s impossible—there’s tens of thousands of vein intersections.” There’s also patterns in vein spacing, different tooth shapes, and a whole host of other features that distinguish one leaf from the next. Unable to commit all these details to memory, botanists rely instead on a manual method of identification developed in the 1800s. That method—called leaf architecture—hasn’t changed much since. It relies on a fat reference book filled with “an unambiguous and standard set of terms for describing leaf form and venation,” and it’s a painstaking process; Wilf says correctly identifying a single leaf’s taxonomy can take two hours.
That’s why, for the past nine years, Wilf has worked with a computational neuroscientist from Brown University to program computer software to do what the human eye cannot: identify families of leaves, in mere milliseconds. The software, which Wilf and his colleagues describe in detail in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines computer vision and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns in leaves, linking them to families of leaves they potentially evolved from with 72 percent accuracy. In doing so, Wilf has designed a user-friendly solution to a once-laborious aspect of paleobotany. The program, he says, “is going to really change how we understand plant evolution.”
The project began in 2007, after Wilf read an article in The Economist titled “Easy on the eyes.” It documented the work of Thomas Serre, the neuroscientist from Brown, on image-recognition software. Serre was at MIT at the time and had taught a computer to distinguish photos with animals from photos without animals, with an 82 percent rate of accuracy. That was better than his (human) students, who only only pulled it off 80 percent of the time. “An alarm went off in my head,” says Wilf, who cold-called Serre and asked if this computer program could be taught to recognize patterns in leaves. Serre said yes, and the two scientists cobbled together a preliminary image set of leaves from about five families and started running recognition tests on the computer. They quickly achieved an accuracy rating of 35 percent.
By now, Wilf and Serre have fed the program a database of 7,597 images of leaves that have been chemically bleached and then stained, to make details like vein patterns and toothed edges pop. Small imperfections like bug bites and tears were purposefully included, since those details provide clues to the plant’s origins. Once the software processes these ghost images, it creates a heat map on top of them. Red dots point out the importance of different codebook elements, or tiny images illustrating some of the 50 different leaf characteristics. Together, the red dots highlight areas relevant to the family the leaf may belong to.
This, rather than detecting species, is the broader goal for Wilf. He wants to start feeding the software tens of thousands of images of unidentified, fossilized plants. If you’re trying to identify a fossil, Wilf says, it’s almost always of an extinct species, “so finding the evolutionary family is one of our motivators.” Knowing the leaf’s species isn’t as helpful as knowing where the leaf came from or what living leaves it’s related to—invaluable information to a paleobotanist.
In this way, Wilf and Serre’s tool creates a stronger bridge between the taxonomical aspects of paleobotany and the ecological side of things. Ellen Currano, an assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming, says that bridge has been sorely lacking. “You could go into a herbarium and look at leaves, or say, ‘I see big leaves, it must be from a wet place,'” but that’s less than efficient.” Currano, who has studied with Wilf in the past but did not work on this study, also points out that modern botanists can often discern a leaf’s taxonomy by looking at the flower or the fruit, but that those often get fossilized separately from each other. “It’s a tremendous challenge to have the leaf, but not flower or fruit,” she says. “So [Wilf’s tool] is an important breakthrough in that it’s taxonomy based on leaves.”
It’s also taxonomy based on machine learning and image recognition. “Everyone”—at least, every paleobotanist—“has had that dream in their head, if only I could just take a picture of this, and get an identity,” Currano says. In seeking to fulfill that wish, Wilf has taken the same approach to studying fossils that Google engineers have taken to streamlining your search results, or teaching a computer to dominate at Go. Wilf even goes so far as to call his tool “an assistant.”
“Assistant” is an apt description. After all, Wilf’s creation doesn’t always provide hard answers (the software, he reiterates, is 72% accurate, not 100%), but it does serve up helpful prompts and ideas. The computer can quickly, and without bias, see what a well-trained botanist might otherwise overlook—and once the computer presents a promising line of inquiry, human analysis can resume. It’s the kind of tool that Wilf is optimistic will unleash “a flood of new botanical information”—but he’s definitely not worried about his job. “It’s not going to replace botanists,” he says, “but it is going to show them where to look.”
For humans, walkable neighborhoods and commercial hubs reward strolling with varied architecture, safe street crossings, and a mix of things to do and see on foot. For dogs, there is a much larger world of scent. Can our canine companions guide us to a richer walking experience?
Frank Edgerton Martin
Dogs and other animals understand sidewalks and parks not as visually ordered settings but as shifting islands and drifts of smells. When we humans step out the door, it’s basically the same outdoors we left behind. But for the dog with us on a leash, a street is like a flowing stream filled with the scent trails of passing people and dogs. It’s an ever-changing place.
In 2003, I adopted a yellow Labrador named Samson from the Hennepin County Humane Society. When I first saw him, he struck me as quiet and observant as he sat there upright, regarding the other dogs as they barked and whimpered. For years, Samson spent his days sitting Sphinx-like on the front steps, left paw crossed on right, surveying passersby. He became famous among the neighbors for wanting to sit outside even on the coldest January days.
Samson loved meeting people and other dogs. He was a natural greeter, but we found little social life along the roads and subdivisions of our Lake Minnetonka neighborhood. And because I myself was more interested in architecture than in exercise, I often found our walks boring. But Samson and I both needed exercise and to get outside for strolls. Over the years we developed a set of alternative suburban environments that made sense for both of us.
Instead of walking by lawns and large houses, we got in the car (a thrill for Samson) and drove to denser places where we could do the things we liked, such as: smelling other dogs, visiting antique shops, sniffing sidewalk trees, and sitting in outdoor cafés while greeting people and watching traffic. We often went to downtown Excelsior, a 19th-century town where we could do all of these things. But we also made new discoveries. For some reason, Samson loved outlet malls, perhaps because the long sidewalks afforded him the chance to meet a lot of people.
I took him to Tonkadale Greenhouse and other nurseries where we could walk among the plants in winter, admiring shoppers could pet him, and we could take in the fragrances and humidity. In summer, we went to public docks on Lake Minnetonka, where Samson greeted those departing from the tour boats. Seniors and teenage girls particularly loved him.
TALKING SCENTS In her collection of essays On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz takes us along on eleven treks, mostly in Manhattan, with experts in a variety of different fields—graphic design, geology, entomology, and so on. Another one of the experts is her dog Flip, who reminds me of a more citified version of Samson.
Horowitz is a cognitive psychologist who writes extensively on dogs and how they perceive the world. In describing her walk with Flip, she notes that “smell, like memory, is entirely personal. It cannot be shared with the ease that an image, rendered in ink or oils, can be experienced by hundreds of millions of viewers.”
Smells are not easily communicated in words; we humans have only vague olfactory classifications such as “sweet,” “earthy,” or “pungent.” But dogs like Flip and Samson experience nuanced smells in thousands of variations. They may not have a word for each, but they have recognition all the same. For dogs, smells form an unfolding map of information about specific places and other animals and people. “Their world has a topography wrought of odors . . . the landscape is brightly colored with aromas,” writes Horowitz.
ARBY’S When touring a neighborhood, we humans use visual classifications such as “late Victorian” or “New Urbanist.” Dogs, of course, could care less. From my walks with Samson, I learned more about the experiences that mattered to him, and, in doing so, I began to appreciate suburban landscapes in a different way.
I learned that busy places like Main Streets and public parks have a smell history. Huge parking lots can be bleak for all. Samson and I agreed that big-box stores and malls were the worst—visual and olfactory deserts unsuitable for a hike. But a parking lot at Arby’s could be a sacred place.
At least it was for Samson, who generally refused to leave after we sat on the grassy suburban berm and shared a bag of curly fries. After snacks, I would walk with him around the building—along the lane leading to the drive-thru, past the drive-thru window (with faster sniffing because much is dropped there), and around to the back where the exhaust fans are (a kind of climax). This circuit never tired him, and he would tug billy-goat-like on the leash when I tried to get him back into the car. Inevitably, I would have to pick him up, all 75 pounds, and dump him in the backseat.
A dog can sniff fast when there is much to take in, like at a drive-thru window—up to seven times per second. Humans can only take in a new scent about once every two seconds. We have about five million olfactory sense receptors; a bloodhound can have 300 million. A dog can gauge a smell’s strength by its variance between nostrils.
Samson and I had many kinds of walks, the hardest being the “process of elimination” at 7:00 on January mornings. When it was 20 degrees below zero, he always sniffed too long. But sometimes we both liked to linger in a place. We might sit in a park, Samson sniffing with darting nose the scents of other dogs flowing from upwind. With my eyes and ears, I observed things too—where people gathered, the shouts of children, and impromptu soccer games on an open patch of grass.
TAKING THE TIME In an interview with the National Canine Research Council, Horowitz put into words what I intuited from Samson: We need to value our dogs’ “dogness.” This “means appreciating that they get bored, and working to give them things to do; it means celebrating their perceptual abilities, and letting them smell the well-marked spots at length,” she explained.
By following our canine companion’s lead, we two-legged animals can rediscover important things—the fragrances of childhood, so deeply implanted that they seem like they occurred only yesterday. From my walks with Samson, I recalled the smell of leaves burning on an October afternoon; the peonies in June that my mother floated in a crystal bowl; what a pumpkin smells like when you carve it. No matter how boring a place may seem, a dog can open up a new journey. If I’d never had my walks with Samson, I may never have lingered, pausing to discover scents and other creatures hidden in a world we mostly see.
In order to study the effects of an ice storm on tree growth, susceptibility to pests and pathogens, changes in habitat for wildlife, a team of researchers created an ice storm at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire.
By the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
A team of scientists in New Hampshire recently succeeded in capturing one of nature's most destructive forces - ice - and corralling it in two large research plots on the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.
Scientists from the USDA Forest Service, Syracuse University, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Cornell University, University of Vermont, and the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation created an experimental ice storm that will improve understanding of short- and long-term effects of ice on northern forests.
Ice storms are a big deal in a changing world. Ice storms are expected to become more frequent and severe in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada as long term climate continues to warm while short term weather patterns still bring blasts of arctic air into the region.
Large Ice storms disrupt lives and damage infrastructure in towns and cities in northern New England, resulting in billions of dollars in damage. Ice storms also literally reshape forests. Heavy ice loads break branches and topple whole trees, resulting in reduced tree growth in ensuing years, increased susceptibility to pests and pathogens, changes in habitat for wildlife, and alterations in how nutrients like carbon and nitrogen cycle in the forest.
"Science is critical to our understanding of how climate change may shape forests in the future," said Tony Ferguson, acting director of the Northern Research Station and the Forest Products Laboratory. "Creating an ice storm is a very unique experiment that would not be possible without all of our partners and funding from the National Science Foundation."
While ice storms are a powerful force in forests, they are also inherently difficult to study because scientists, like citizens, have little lead time on when and where these storms are going to occur. Scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest are changing that equation, and instead of waiting for the next big storm to hit, they are creating their own artificial ice storms using high-pressure firefighting pumps and hoses to spray water high up into the forest canopy during a cold snap. They are measuring the obvious and immediate downing of limbs and trees, as well as subtler longer term growth responses, interactions with invasive species, and impacts on forest nutrient cycling.
"This research will provide the scientific community, land managers and the concerned public greater insight on the impacts of these powerful, frightening, and curiously aesthetic extreme winter weather events on ecosystem dynamics in northern hardwood forests," said Lindsey Rustad, team leader at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest and an investigator on the ice storm experiment.
"Ice storms are a great example of extreme weather events with complex outcomes. The experimental ice storm is part of a comprehensive study of ice storms and their effects at Hubbard Brook, which also includes examining forest recovery from a severe ice storm in 1998, developing and applying models to depict the climate conditions that result in ice storms and forest ecosystem effects, and associated outreach and education," said Charles Driscoll, a professor at Syracuse University and investigator for the Hubbard Brook ice storm experiment.
In addition to Rustad and Driscoll, investigators in the experiment include John Campbell and Paul Schaberg of the USDA Forest Service; Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, and Sarah Garlick of the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation. Partners include Peter Groffman of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Timothy Fahey of Cornell University, and Robert Sanford and Joe Staples of the University of Southern Maine.
The Hubbard Brook Ice Storm Experiment is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB-1457675 - Collaborative Research: Understanding the Impacts of Ice Storms on Forest Ecosystems of the Northeastern United States).
The mission of the Forest Service's Northern Research Station is to improve people's lives and help sustain the natural resources in the Northeast and Midwest through leading-edge science and effective information delivery.
The mission of the Forest Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. The agency manages 193 million acres of public land, provides assistance to state and private landowners, and maintains the largest forestry research organization in the world.
Public lands the Forest Service manages contribute more than $13 billion to the economy each year through visitor spending alone. Those same lands provide 20 percent of the nation's clean water supply, a value estimated at $7.2 billion per year. The agency has either a direct or indirect role in stewardship of about 80 percent of the 850 million forested acres within the U.S., of which 100 million acres are urban forests where most Americans live.
“When I say, ‘Trees suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.” PETER WOHLLEBENCredit
Gordon Welters for The New York Times
HÜMMEL, Germany — IN the deep stillness of a forest in winter, the sound of footsteps on a carpet of leaves died away. Peter Wohlleben
had found what he was looking for: a pair of towering beeches. “These
trees are friends,” he said, craning his neck to look at the leafless
crowns, black against a gray sky. “You see how the thick branches point
away from each other? That’s so they don’t block their buddy’s light.”
Before
moving on to an elderly beech to show how trees, like people, wrinkle
as they age, he added, “Sometimes, pairs like this are so interconnected
at the roots that when one tree dies, the other one dies, too.”
Mr.
Wohlleben, 51, is a very tall career forest ranger who, with his ramrod
posture and muted green uniform, looks a little like one of the sturdy
beeches in the woods he cares for. Yet he is lately something of a
sensation as a writer in Germany,
a place where the forest has long played an outsize role in the
cultural consciousness, in places like fairy tales, 20th-century
philosophy, Nazi ideology and the birth of the modern environmental
movement.
Mr. Wohlleben traces his love
of the forest to his early childhood, where he raised spiders and
turtles. In high school, teachers painted a dire picture of the world’s
ecological future, and he decided it was his mission to help.Credit
Gordon Welters for The New York Times
After
the publication in May of Mr. Wohlleben’s book, a surprise hit titled
“The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate —
Discoveries From a Secret World,” the German forest is back in the
spotlight. Since it first topped best-seller lists last year, Mr.
Wohlleben has been spending more time on the media trail and less on the
forest variety, making the case for a popular reimagination of trees,
which, he says, contemporary society tends to look at as “organic
robots” designed to produce oxygen and wood.
Presenting
scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic
terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and
talk-show audiences alike with the news — long known to biologists —
that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and
remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending
electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”;
and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled
companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through
their roots.
“With
his book, he changed the way I look at the forest forever,” Markus
Lanz, a popular talk show host, said in an email. “Every time I walk
through a beautiful woods, I think about it.”
Though
duly impressed with Mr. Wohlleben’s ability to capture the public’s
attention, some German biologists question his use of words, like “talk”
rather than the more standard “communicate,” to describe what goes on
between trees in the forest.
But
this, says Mr. Wohlleben, who invites readers to imagine what a tree
might feel when its bark tears (“Ouch!”), is exactly the point. “I use a
very human language,” he explained. “Scientific language removes all
the emotion, and people don’t understand it anymore. When I say, ‘Trees
suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.”
Still
No. 1 on the Spiegel best-seller list for nonfiction, “Hidden Life” has
sold 320,000 copies and has been optioned for translation in 19
countries (Canada’s Greystone Books will publish an English version in
September). “It’s one of the biggest successes of the year,” said Denis
Scheck, a German literary critic who praised the humble narrative style
and the book’s ability to awaken in readers an intense, childlike
curiosity about the workings of the world.
The popularity of “The Hidden Life of Trees,” Mr. Scheck added, says less about Germany
than it does about modern life. People who spend most of their time in
front of computers want to read about nature. “Germans are reputed to
have a special relationship with the forest, but it’s kind of a cliché,”
Mr. Scheck said. “Yes, there’s Hansel and Gretel, and, sure, if your
marriage fails, you go for a long hike in the woods. But I don’t think
Germans love their forest more than Swedes or Norwegians or Finns.”
Mr.
Wohlleben traces his own love of the forest to his early childhood.
Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in Bonn, then the West German capital,
he raised spiders and turtles, and liked playing outside more than any
of his three siblings did. In high school, a generation of young,
left-leaning teachers painted a dire picture of the world’s ecological
future, and he decided it was his mission to help.
He
studied forestry, and began working for the state forestry
administration in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1987. Later, as a young
forester in charge of a 3,000-odd acre woodlot in the Eifel region,
about an hour outside Cologne, he felled old trees and sprayed logs with
insecticides. But he did not feel good about it: “I thought, ‘What am I
doing? I’m making everything kaput.’ ”
Reading
up on the behavior of trees — a topic he learned little about in
forestry school — he found that, in nature, trees operate less like
individuals and more as communal beings. Working together in networks
and sharing resources, they increase their resistance.
By
artificially spacing out trees, the plantation forests that make up
most of Germany’s woods ensure that trees get more sunlight and grow
faster. But, naturalists say, creating too much space between trees can
disconnect them from their networks, stymieing some of their inborn
resilience mechanisms.
Intrigued,
Mr. Wohlleben began investigating alternate approaches to forestry.
Visiting a handful of private forests in Switzerland and Germany, he was
impressed. “They had really thick, old trees,” he said. “They treated
their forest much more lovingly, and the wood they produced was more
valuable. In one forest, they said, when they wanted to buy a car, they
cut two trees. For us, at the time, two trees would buy you a pizza.”
Back
in the Eifel in 2002, Mr. Wohlleben set aside a section of “burial
woods,” where people could bury cremated loved ones under 200-year-old
trees with a plaque bearing their names, bringing in revenue without
harvesting any wood. The project was financially successful. But, Mr.
Wohlleben said, his bosses were unhappy with his unorthodox activities.
He wanted to go further — for example, replacing heavy logging
machinery, which damages forest soil, with horses — but could not get
permission.
After
a decade of struggling with his higher-ups, he decided to quit. “I
consulted with my family first,” said Mr. Wohlleben, who is married and
has two children. Though it meant giving up the ironclad security of
employment as a German civil servant, “I just thought, ‘I cannot do this
the rest of my life.’” The family planned to emigrate to Sweden. But it turned out that Mr. Wohlleben had won over the forest’s municipal owners.
So,
10 years ago, the municipality took a chance. It ended its contract
with the state forestry administration, and hired Mr. Wohlleben
directly. He brought in horses, eliminated insecticides and began
experimenting with letting the woods grow wilder. Within two years, the
forest went from loss to profit, in part by eliminating expensive
machinery and chemicals.
Despite
his successes, in 2009 Mr. Wohlleben started having panic attacks. “I
kept thinking, ‘Ah! You only have 20 years, and you still have to
accomplish this, and this, and that.’” He began therapy, to treat
burnout and depression. It helped. “I learned to be happy about what
I’ve done so far,” he said. “With a forest, you have to think in terms
of 200 or 300 years. I learned to accept that I can’t do everything.
Nobody can.” He wanted to write “The Hidden Life of Trees” to show laypeople how great trees are.
Stopping
to consider a tree that rose up straight then curved like a question
mark, Mr. Wohlleben said, however, that it was the untrained perspective
of visitors he took on forest tours years ago to which he owed much
insight.
“For
a forester, this tree is ugly, because it is crooked, which means you
can’t get very much money for the wood,” he said. “It really surprised
me, walking through the forest, when people called a tree like this one
beautiful. They said, ‘My life hasn’t always run in a straight line,
either.’ And I began to see things with new eyes.”
