This article is annoyingly fluffy. Trees absolutely do communicate with each other, and with other creatures, and it's amazingly cool -- but you don't need to a

This article is annoyingly fluffy. Trees absolutely do communicate with each other, and with other creatures, and it's amazingly cool -- but you don't need to anthropomorphize them so drastically! It's OK for them to be a bit alien. If you want a somewhat more solid take on the subject, The Songs of Trees is a lovely book. (Mentioned in the article.) It has digressions into geology and anthropology and politics but ties it all together, using specific trees as focal points. I don't know exactly how much of the chemical signaling stuff it goes into -- I'm still in chapter 2 -- but I found the chapter on ceibo to be fascinating. I particularly liked the section this quote is from, talking about how the natives of the area think about the forest network: « The Western mind can perceive and understand abstractions such as ideas, rules, processes, connections, and patterns. These are all invisible, yet we believe them to be as real as any object. Amazonian rainforest spirits are analogous, perhaps, to Western reality dreams such as money, time, and nation-states. » (I wish I had a quote with more context, but that's the best I could do on short notice.)