The wisdom of the forests

Are trees solitary beings?

Until the 1990s, biologists thought that trees lived alone and competed hard to capture sunlight to draw water.

The acorn fallen from the oak would thus find itself left to its own devices in the middle of the forest, forced to manage to draw water and minerals from the earth, pull out a first stem, then leaves, produce its own photosynthesis and grow. by himself.

Moreover, when you walk in the forest, you rarely hear the trees talking to each other. We also don't see them hugging or cuddling.

On the contrary, some would even tend to avoid contact with others, what botanists poetically call the "timidity of trees".

But in reality, if we don't see any sign of tenderness or mutual aid between the trees, it's for a simple reason: the trees lead their private life... out of sight.

Here's what trees and mushrooms are doing in hiding... right under your feet!

We owe this discovery to Canadian Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.

On August 7, 1997, the researcher and five of her colleagues made an immense discovery, published in the prestigious journal Nature.

Their study reveals for the first time the existence of a secret life of trees, carried out without our knowledge in the forests, just under our feet... with the complicity of mushrooms.

Because if we can of course see their foot or their hat, we know less that mushrooms extend underground by ultrafine roots, innumerable filaments called the mycelium.

Thanks to the mycelium, the mushrooms form a veritable underground network, in contact with the roots and the plants. And this network can take on unbelievable dimensions…

“The web is so dense that there can be kilometers of network of mycelium under a footprint,” explains Suzanne Simard.

In Switzerland, we notably discovered an old armillary (a fungus that parasitizes conifers) over 1000 years old and whose mycelium covered nearly 40 hectares!

Armillaria ostoyae

What for, you are going to tell me?

The first use of these filaments of mycelium is to seek and absorb nutrients to feed the fungus that emerges on the surface and will be used for its reproduction.

But the mycelium, in its infinite ramifications, devotes itself well beyond itself.

Welcome to the biggest market in the world

Suzanne Simard and her team discovered that the vast network formed by the mycelium allows fungi and plants to… communicate with each other and barter.

This mycelium is like “the Internet of the undergrowth”.

To begin with, the mycelium digests all the cellulose of dead plants and distributes water and micronutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, trace elements) to all the plants.

The exchange is obviously not one-way and, for their part, the fungi receive from the plants, thanks to photosynthesis, the carbonaceous matter to feed themselves.

"It's the biggest 'market' in the world: the exchange of plant carbon for sugar. Thus, the greatest transaction takes place under our feet every day”, exclaims the Belgian industrialist Gunter Pauli, who advocates an economy inspired by nature.

If this discovery caused a lot of noise in scientific circles, it will take almost 20 years for the general public to become aware of it, thanks to the worldwide success of the book by German forester Peter Wohlleben The secret life of trees, published in 2015.

In this book, here is what Peter Wohlleben describes:

“The fungus not only penetrates and envelopes the roots of the tree, but it develops its network of filaments in the surrounding soil. It extends far beyond the roots of its host to mingle with the roots of other trees and it connects with partner fungi and the roots of each new tree it encounters. This results in a vast network of exchanges of both nutrients and information, for example on the imminence of an insect attack. »

And to think that this is only a very small glimpse of what is going on at every moment in the forests, the woods, the groves, the meadows of this nature that we believe to be asleep.

Why am I telling you all of this ?

Because it seems to me that this underlines the extent to which caution, humility and respect for the living should guide human development choices. We have a lot, a lot still to learn from nature, which has a lot to offer us.

What the mushrooms manufacture with their immense underground network is the mechanism based on principles that we thought were purely human and which are called solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid.

As we see with the example of the mycelium, these principles are indeed the universal foundations that guide and organize life as a whole.

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