Sean Dooley 2014. The Hidden Life of Trees. What the feel, how they communicate. Melbourne: Black Inc, 272 pp.

Rather too much anthropomorphising for my taste, but nevertheless a view of plant life, especialy long-lived trees, that is different and compelling. The anthropomorphising, however, is clearly aimed at opening the reader to a new view of the world of trees. Wohlleben is a forester but he has done substantial research; his book is especially good for emphasising the different time scale over which events and evolution plays out in the tree world. And and the discoveries that trees in a forest are to an extent social (over vast time scales) and that they share information and even biomass (even between species) notably via extensive root networks involving fungal hyphae.

But most of the value is in the early chapters; the last part of the book is mostly “just-so stories” from the regular evolution and ecology storybooks, albeit with trees as examples.