By Margot Russell

Next time you are walking through a swath of trees, whether on a trail near Westfield or in the shady confines of your backyard, I want you to picture this: that the trees all live in their own small village, with rambunctious saplings playing the role of the village youngsters, the elder trees playing the stately kings and their court, and the newly established trees the princes waiting for their elders to fall so they can take their rightful place in the sunshine.

And don’t believe for a second that the trees are inanimate and idol. There are dramas being played out right before your eyes as the trees struggle for existence, as they feed their youngsters, as they warn one another of encroaching danger.

Maybe this sounds like a woodlands fairytale, but scientists have come to believe trees live a rich and complex life, just beyond the scope of our perception.

“They’re involved in tremendous struggles and death-defying dramas. To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks,” an article in Smithsonian Magazine has suggested.

Could it be true, as one nature writer put forth, that trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated–and even intelligent–than we thought?

Approach two trees that stand next to one another in the woods. Imagine that the two trees are friends and are very dependent on one another.

Their root systems are closely interconnected and they are very careful to share the life-sustaining sunlight. And because they so rely on one another, if one dies, the other may soon follow.

“Some are calling it the ‘wood-wide web,'” says Peter, a German forester who has penned a best-selling book called “The Hidden Life Of Trees.”

“All the trees here,” he recently said to a reporter in his forest, “and in every forest, are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages.”

“For young saplings in a deeply shaded part of the forest, the network is literally a lifeline. Lacking the sunlight to photosynthesize, they survive because big trees, including their parents, pump sugar into their roots through the network,” Wohlleben says.

How does this communication work?

Scientists say the networks shared by trees are called mycorrhizal networks. They’re made up of fine hair-like root tips along with microscopic fungus. The trees and the fungi have a deal: the fungi must scour the woods for nitrogen, phosphorous and other minerals to help feed the trees, and in exchange the fungi gets to consume about 30% of the sugar the tree makes from the process of photosynthesis.

And here’s where it gets really interesting: trees appear to send chemical, hormonal and electrical signals out through the woods, in what is being called a voltage-based signaling system. It’s very similar to the human nervous system, although no one is going as far as to say that trees actually have brains.

Trees also communicate in another way: through the air, using pheromones and other scent signals.

So, what do the trees like to talk about? Well, mostly they are relaying alarm and distress. Let’s look at an example: if a giraffe starts chewing on a acacia tree in Africa, the injured tree emits a distress signal in the form of ethylene gas. Alarmed, the neighboring trees start pumping tannins into their own leaves—in quantities enough to kill large herbivores.

Giraffes are aware of this, and they too, alter their behavior around distressed acacia trees so they can best protect themselves.

Trees can also detect scents through their leaves, and seem to have a sense of taste.

“When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, for example, they detect the caterpillar saliva, and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps,” the Smithsonian article points out. “The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out. ‘Very unpleasant for the caterpillars,’ says Wohlleben. ‘Very clever of the trees.'”

Research has suggested that trees know the taste of deer saliva. “When a deer is biting a branch, the tree brings defending chemicals to make the leaves taste bad,” Wohlleben says.

Researchers in the Pacific Northwest have discovered certain mother trees know their own kin and send them more carbon than trees unrelated to them.

With the earth’s trees becoming almost humanlike through research, you might be tempted to go outside and hug the next tree you see, but our German forester doesn’t think trees respond to hugs. But who knows? Maybe the earth’s tree huggers have been right all along.

One thing is for certain: we are only just learning the secrets that nature harbors and that are hidden from our view. We had long ago decided we are the kings of the natural world, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe.

But the more we learn, the more magical the natural world appears to be. And the more humble we become to nature’s majesty.