The Genius of Trees: How They Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World

A mind-expanding exploration of how trees learned to shape our world by manipulating the elements, plants, animals, and even humankind, possessing agency beyond anything we might have imagined

“Astounding . . . a true masterpiece . . . Rix refuses to put herself much in the picture, but through the scenes we glimpse an Indiana Jones figure who is both an eminent, travelling scientist and a born writer.”—The Telegraph

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

For a supposedly stationary life-form, trees have demonstrated an astonishing mastery over the environment around them. In The Genius of Trees, tree scientist Harriet Rix reveals the inventive ways trees sculpt their environment and explains the science of how they achieve these incredible feats. Taking us on an awe-inspiring journey through deep history and unseen biochemistry across the globe, Rix restores trees to their rightful station, not as victims of our negligence but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative. Trees manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends, as seen with oaks in Devon, England, shaping ecosystems through root networks and fungi, and in Amedi, Iraq, changing sexes as they age; laurel rainforests in the Canary Islands regulating water cycles; and metasequoias in California influencing microclimates.

Some tree species have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Others can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch. And new discoveries are constantly coming to light: research has shown that trees have an even greater role in preventing global warming than we thought--trees, at one time thought to produce methane actually consume it. We share one world with trees and one need for survival.

This eye-opening journey into the inner lives of nature’s most powerful plant is a profoundly new and original way of understanding both the miracles trees perform and the glories of our natural world.

Harriet Rix is a tree science consultant who travels widely studying trees around the world. She was formerly based at the Tree Council, where she researched tree diseases and urban tree strategies. Rix holds a biochemistry degree from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. She was a London Library Emerging Writer, and her writing and photography have been published in the Financial Times, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement, among others.