The Genius of Trees

A mesmerising, mind-expanding global story which shows how trees have learned to use the soil, air, water, plants, fungi, fire, animals, and people around them to shape our world - possessing agency beyond anything we might have imagined.

The Genius of Trees tells a mind-expanding global story revealing the inventive and astonishing ways trees have learned to shape our natural world.

Over hundreds of millions of years, from prehistoric forests to the trees around us today, we see trees using fire as a reproductive tool, harnessing large mammals to spread their seeds (but poisoning smaller, less useful mammals), and splitting rock to create fertile ground in barren landscapes.

Because trees, we discover, manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends. From oaks growing in Devon to the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands and metasequoias in California, from the magnificent sex-shifting oaks of Iraq to the ancient junipers of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border which spin carbon dioxide into rock - trees sculpt their environments.

At once transporting and expert, this profoundly original exploration of the science of trees is a startlingly new way of understanding these glories of our natural world.

The Genius of Trees gives us hope for the future. It enables us to see trees, for the first time, not as victims but as agents of change in a grand ecological narrative - and as leading actors in the great drama of life on earth.