The Secret Language of Old-Growth Forests

Walk into an old-growth forest and you step into a conversation that has been going on for centuries. Beneath the leaf litter, a vast web of fungal threads connects tree to tree, carrying sugars, water, and warning signals between the tallest canopy giants and the youngest seedlings on the forest floor. Foresters have taken to calling it the wood wide web, and it upends the old idea of the forest as a crowd of solitary trees competing for light.

A mother tree, the oldest and largest in a stand, can be linked to hundreds of its neighbours. When a seedling is struggling in deep shade, sugars flow toward it through the network. When one tree comes under attack from insects, chemical alarms travel through the soil and neighbouring trees begin to raise their defences before the pests even arrive. Cut the connections, and the whole community grows more slowly and more sickly. It turns out a forest is less a collection of individuals than a single, patient, living thing that measures its life in centuries.