German forest manager Peter Wohllben’s The Hidden Life of Trees explains life, death and regeneration in the forest. His investigation of how trees communicate reveals the forest as a social network connected by chemical signals and a web of fungal mycorrhizae, the “wood wide web.”
Food writer Eugenia Bone takes us on a wide-ranging ramble from the symbiotic relationship of underground mycorrhizal fungus and plants, to meditative – and sometimes competitive – mushroom hunting for the table in Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms.
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer treats us to a spiritual, aesthetic and scientific appreciation of the “unseen lives complex and beautiful” of mosses, in her book of essays, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. A plant ecologist of Indigenous heritage, she has long regarded plants as her teachers as she works to restore both ecological communities and our relationship to land. “All it takes is attention and knowing how to look,” she writes, “I’ve found mosses to be a vehicle for intimacy with the landscape, like a secret knowledge of the forest. This book is an invitation into that landscape.” Amen.
