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Old 02-24-2018, 09:08 AM
MChild62 MChild62 is offline
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Default Spruce and The Hidden Life of Trees

I don’t think I’ll be able to look at an acoustic guitar the same, after having read Peter Wohlleben’s wonderful book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Discoveries from a Secret World.

The book’s opening line is: “When I began my professional career as a forester, I knew about as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals.”

What follows is eye-popping. The author talks about his own experiences in Germany’s forests, his research, and what modern studies have revealed about forests and the incredible social/symbiotic networks that exist between trees, fungi, and animals, much of it taking place underground. Things like their methods of communication, how trees “learn” (and they really do appear to learn, not just adapt), how they nurture injured or ill comrades by sharing precious food (sometimes keeping even stumps alive for centuries), how the oldest of old-growth trees play critical roles in keeping forests vital, and how commercial forests tend to isolate and deprive individual trees of the benefits of these networks and harvest them long before they have reached maturity.

Take a look at that perfect-sounding Sitka spruce top of your guitar, and consider that even if it came from a 250 year-old tree in an old growth forest it was still, relatively speaking, a teenager in its overall development. Wohlleben points out that, in old growth forests, trees can spend an incredible 80-120 years in a juvenile stage where they are “no thicker than a pencil and no taller than a person.” This glacially slow early growth helps these trees establish the foundation for stable growth that will come later. If they do win the battle over their siblings (and boar and deer that want to eat them), they can grow tall and old. Once they get old - truly old - they take on important responsibilities in the forest.

For example:

“Old trees can perform another very specific function in the forest ecosystem. In Central Europe, there are no longer any true old-growth forests. The largest extensive stand of trees is between two hundred and three hundred years old. Until these forest preserves become old growth forests once again, we must look to the West Coast of Canada to understand the role played by ancient trees. There, Dr. Zoe Lindo of McGill University in Montreal researched Sitka spruce that were at least five hundred years old. First of all, she discovered large quantities of moss on the branches and in the branch forks of trees of this advanced age. Blue-green algae had colonized the trees’ mossy cushions. These algae capture nitrogen from the air and process it into a form the trees can use. Rain then washes this natural fertilizer down the trunks, making it available to the roots. Thus, old trees fertilize the forest and help their offspring get a better start in life.”

And consider also this about the roots of spruce trees in a Swedish forest: “Research revealed the spruce to be an absolutely unbelievable 9,550 years old. The individual shoots were younger, but these new growths from the past few centuries were not considered to be stand-alone trees but part of a larger whole.”

I remember seeing a video that Bob Taylor put on youtube a decade ago about harvesting the wood from a 350-year old spruce that had been felled by high winds in an old growth forest. According to Hidden Life, the wood taken to build guitars was from a tree that had yet to reach its prime.

Amazing book for anyone interested in wood, forests or ecosystems, or just cool discoveries from science. And if you didn’t already have huge respect for your acoustic guitar and at least a little guilt, this book will get you there.
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Old 02-24-2018, 09:45 AM
simpl man simpl man is offline
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Thanks for sharing this
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Old 02-24-2018, 10:18 AM
mischultz mischultz is offline
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Lovely. Heading over to Amazon now.
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Old 02-24-2018, 10:24 AM
Jaden Jaden is offline
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Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I live on the west coast of Canada in a rainforest area and take daily walks through an old growth river watershed, so coming home to see my Sitka spruce tops, it’s like viewing wood preserved in a museum, but the best conservation is care of the ecosystem from where it came from.
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Old 02-24-2018, 10:27 AM
IndyHD28 IndyHD28 is offline
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Yes Sir, it's truly magnificent, isn’t it?

Last edited by Kerbie; 02-24-2018 at 07:55 PM. Reason: Religion
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Old 02-24-2018, 11:06 AM
Arthur Blake Arthur Blake is offline
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Read a book in 1973 that changed the way I look and feel about the world, called The Secret Life of Plants. Seems they've since made a film about the book. Cleve Backster, polygraph expert and pioneer got a reading from a plant leaf when he had no match but thought about burning the leaf.
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Old 02-24-2018, 11:39 AM
M Hayden M Hayden is offline
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William Preston’s “The Wild Trees,” about giant sequoia in California, is another amazing book on the same lines. Apparently redwoods have their own ecosystems located over 200 feet up, with soil and huckleberry bushes and more growing up there.
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Old 02-24-2018, 12:57 PM
Gaetano Gaetano is offline
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I live in Central America on the Pacific coast, but a 3 hour drive over several mountain ranges, and I’m in a Rain Forest with an active volcano. Just as we struggle to describe the timbre of a guitar, it’s the same for trying to describe one of Mother Nature’s Masterpieces. I’ve been to many Rain Forests, and they are thick with trees. I am told that sometimes it takes 20 seconds for a raindrop to fall from the canopy to the forest floor. The views will take away your breath. The Rain Forest has a micro climate that is different from surrounding areas. It is quite a place, especially if you like trees.

For those of you adventurers and lovers of Mother Nature, a trip to a Rain Forest is priceless. I encourage you to travel with respect for all life, and with a carbon fiber guitar.
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Old 02-24-2018, 05:26 PM
MChild62 MChild62 is offline
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Enjoyed very much the feedback! I have added (a) new books to my reading list (many thanks!), (b) a rainforest destination to a future holiday (also thanks!), and (c) potential considerations of a carbon fiber guitar or at least sustainable wood.

I was already thinking about that last one after reading the Wohlleben book, but it's hard!
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Old 02-24-2018, 05:52 PM
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fazool fazool is offline
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Was waiting to have lunch with our daughter and read your review. Immediately ordered and picked up the book (we were in the Barnes & Noble parking lot. I'm looking forward to reading it. The clerk told me he heard it's a great book.
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Old 02-24-2018, 05:57 PM
ChalkLitIScream ChalkLitIScream is offline
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Really glad I took a plant bio course last year. Certainly as complex as animals. Some plants recognize kin and decide to share resources. That's pretty amazing, if I say so myself. Perhaps i'll read Wyndham's The day of the triffids again soon...
Thanks for sharing this
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Old 02-24-2018, 06:24 PM
Plainsman Plainsman is offline
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Thanks! I just ordered it too!
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Old 02-24-2018, 07:54 PM
Gaetano Gaetano is offline
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MChild62,

I forgot to thank you for posting this information. Interesting stuff. Many trees in the Rain Forest have a symbiotic relationship with the bromeliads. They grow in the canopy, but also on the sides of trees and in those places where fallen branches once grew. Planning a Rain Forest trip is half the fun. The more you know, the more you’ll learn. Go for it!

I witnessed the symbiotic relationship between the leafcutter ants and the parakeets. In a tree at my place, the leafcutter ants and the parakeets built a 1 foot high hanging sock type of nest. The parakeets provided twigs and coconut fibers as the leafcutter ants supplied the plant leaves, flower fragments, and saliva. It took 2 weeks to complete. How strong was it? Well, the sock nest swung smoothly during high winds from a strategically placed part of a flexible branch (Physics lesson). The nest was about 15 feet from the top of the tree. This part of the tree provided shelter from the sun and rains. It also was hidden from the sights of the Falcons. And yes, the baby parakeets were safe inside. When the babies left the nest, it was totally abandoned. No longer maintained, it fell from the tree. It took just a few rains for the nest to break apart, and become ready to be recycled. Cool how these things work out.

BTW, I mentioned carbon graphite guitars because of the humidity changes in and around the Rain Forest. It’s nice not to worry about the potential for neck movement.

I noticed that you live in Firenze. Do you play guitar at Boboli Gardens when the tourists are gone?

Again, thanks for posting this info. I’ll look into the book.

Gaetano
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Old 02-24-2018, 10:19 PM
AllThumbsBruce AllThumbsBruce is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Arthur Blake View Post
Read a book in 1973 that changed the way I look and feel about the world, called The Secret Life of Plants. Seems they've since made a film about the book. Cleve Backster, polygraph expert and pioneer got a reading from a plant leaf when he had no match but thought about burning the leaf.
Secret Life of Plants is different in that it is widely regarded as being nonsense. Wohlleben appears to have used anthropomorphic language to describe well-known science.
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Old 02-25-2018, 09:41 AM
Alan Carruth Alan Carruth is offline
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AlThumbsBruce wrote:
"Wohlleben appears to have used anthropomorphic language to describe well-known science. "

Exactly, which is both a strength and a weakness of the book. I just finished reading it a week or so ago, and am a bit ambivalent.

Certainly his language is useful in helping to convey a lot of the more recent science in a way that is immediately available to folks with a less technical bent. As we learn more we find that a forest is not simply a collection of more or less random plants that all happen to grow well in the particular climate. In fact it is much more 'networked', at a far finer scale, than we would have imagined. Trees produce chemicals that they do not need themselves, feeding them instead to fungi and other things, which, in turn, help to supply the tree with things it does need. He does a very good job of getting this across.

The problem comes in with the language of 'agency'. It's known that small children see objects as 'agents'; a ball rolls off the shelf and hit somebody on the head because it 'wanted' to. It takes a while for us to outgrow this mind set, at least to some extent. It is, to a degree, baked into the language, and that's part of the issue.

As an example: green wood that is bent tends to fail first on the compression side. In response, trees normally add new wood in a 'pre-stressed' condition, so that it is under tension relative to the older wood further in the trunk. It's easy, when talking about this, to say that the tree 'wants' to have the new wood in tension, so as to reduce failures under bending loads, but, of course, there is nothing volitional about it. At some point in the distant past a woody plant mutated in such a way as to do this, and had a survival advantage, in that it could grow taller than other similar plants without breaking in the wind. The modification was passed on and became a basis for the whole lineage of trees as we know them. We almost never talk about it in that way, simply because it takes so long, and anyway, 'everybody' knows what we mean when we say that the tree 'wants' to have the outer layers of wood in relative tension, and 'employs' a certain mechanism to do it. Except, of course, that there are poeple who don't understand it that way, and will take it the wrong way if they are not careful.

The trap comes when we forget that this is just a convenient shorthand. It is particularly pernicious when it feeds into our normal predilictions toward 'agency' thinking and anthropomorphization. A tree certainly reacts when we break off a branch, but it doesn't say 'ouch!'. Some of the things the tree does are very complex, and it's easy to say that, since we do those sorts of things as the result of thinking, the tree must be thinking as well. I'm not saying we need to be totally Skinnerian here, rejecting the whole concept of 'mind', bit it is awfully hard to see how a tree could 'think' without anything to think with.

This all becomes fraught, and I'm not trying to push this thread into a braod philosophical discourse, which is well beyond my competence or interest anyway. Wohlleben has written an engaging and useful book, which I would recommend to anybody on this list. Science is changing fast, and fields like forestry need to change equally fast if we are to correct the sins of the past. But we need to be careful to avoid over romanticizing things too.
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