Sublime

As árvores não confiam apenas no ar, pois o cheiro do perigo não alcançaria todas as vizinhas. Para contornar essa limitação, elas enviam mensagens também pelas raízes, que as conectam e não dependem do clima para funcionar bem.

Trees have survived until today only because there is a great deal of genetic diversity within each species.

Much closer to realization is an effort to bring back the American chestnut tree. The tree, once common in the eastern United States, was all but wiped out by chestnut blight. (The blight, a fungal pathogen introduced in the early twentieth century, killed off nearly every chestnut in North America—an estimated four billion trees.) Researchers at t

As Tizard points out, we’re constantly moving genes around the world, usually in the form of entire genomes. This is how chestnut blight arrived in North America in the first place; it was carried in on Asian chestnut trees, imported from Japan. If we can correct for our earlier tragic mistake by shifting just one more gene around, don’t we owe it

Dr. Simard’s discovery of the “wood wide web” pervading our forests.9 What and how much information is exchanged

Similar processes are at work in our forests here at home. Beeches, spruce, and oaks all register pain as soon as some creature starts nibbling on them. When a caterpillar takes a hearty bite out of a leaf, the tissue around the site of the damage changes. In addition, the leaf tissue sends out electrical signals, just as human tissue does when it