Is there an audiobook of The Hidden Life of Trees?

Yes. The Hidden Life of Trees has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mike Grady.

Is The Hidden Life of Trees on Kindle Unlimited?

No. The Hidden Life of Trees was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 5, 2026.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben book cover for the Book of the Day nature book review

Our score

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

EDITION PUBLISHEDSeptember 2016

PublisherGreystone Books

Genres

Non-Fiction Nature Science

Themes

Forests as cooperative communitiesCommunication and care in the natural worldSlowness and deep timeReenchantment of the everyday landscape

The Hidden Life of TreesWhat They Feel, How They Communicate

Name: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
Price: 9.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Peter Wohlleben

Peter Wohlleben

Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees reveals the forest as a cooperative, communicating community, where trees share food, warn of danger, and care for their young. A warm, wonder-filled book that changes how you walk through the woods.

The Review

Our take

Peter Wohlleben spent decades as a working forester before he began to suspect that the trees he managed were doing far more than standing still and growing. In The Hidden Life of Trees he gathers the science and his own long observation into a single, gently astonishing argument: that a forest is not a collection of solitary organisms competing for light, but something closer to a community, even a society. Trees, he shows, communicate. They send chemical signals through the air to warn neighbors of insect attack, share sugars with their own offspring and even with ailing companions through the underground fungal networks researchers have nicknamed the wood wide web, and slow their own growth to keep pace with the saplings around them. The cumulative effect is to make the woods feel suddenly, vividly inhabited.

What makes the book work is Wohlleben's voice. He writes about beech and oak with the unhurried affection of someone who has spent a working life among them, and he has a knack for the homely comparison that makes a strange fact land. A mother tree nursing its seedlings in deep shade, a stump kept alive for centuries by the sugars its neighbors quietly feed it, the slow agony of a tree losing its bark, all of it is rendered in plain, companionable prose that never reaches for grandeur it hasn't earned. The chapters are short and self-contained, which makes the book easy to read in unhurried sittings, an essay at a time, the way you might take a walk.

The one caveat worth naming is that Wohlleben is unabashedly fond of his subjects, and his language can tip toward the anthropomorphic. Trees "talk," "feel," and "care" in his telling, and a stricter scientist might want more hedging between the documented findings and the warmer interpretation laid over them. Readers who bristle at that framing should know going in that the book is a forester's love letter as much as a popular-science primer. But Wohlleben is upfront about where the established research ends and his own reading of the forest begins, and the wonder he's chasing is real.

Why you should read

Anyone who loves forests and the natural world
Readers who enjoy accessible, wonder-driven popular science
Walkers and hikers who want to see the woods differently
Fans of nature writing with a warm, personal voice

What to expect

Short, self-contained chapters easy to read slowly
Real forest science carried in plain, friendly prose
Frankly affectionate, sometimes anthropomorphic framing
A lasting shift in how you see any patch of woods

What lingers is less any single fact than a shift in attention. After this book a stand of trees stops being scenery and becomes a slow, sociable world running on a timescale we can barely perceive. It is a small book with an outsized capacity to reenchant something most of us walk past without seeing, and it leaves you wanting to stand still in the nearest patch of woods and simply pay attention. For anyone who loves the natural world, or wants to, it is a quietly transformative read. It belongs to that small category of popular science that does its real work not in the facts it delivers but in the curiosity it awakens, and long after the particular studies fade from memory the changed quality of attention remains. You finish it slower, gentler, more inclined to look up.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.5/ 5

Outstanding

Listen to The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Hidden Life of Trees?: Yes. The Hidden Life of Trees has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Mike Grady.
Listen to The Hidden Life of Trees free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
Is The Hidden Life of Trees on Kindle Unlimited?: No. The Hidden Life of Trees was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on July 5, 2026.
How much does The Hidden Life of Trees cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $9.99, Paperback $13.83, Hardcover $14.08. Prices as of August 26, 2026 at 3:46 AM EDT and may change.

Filed underNature Science Browse the archive →

CollectionsShort Reads Browse collections →

Common questions

What is The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate about?: Peter Wohlleben spent decades as a working forester before he began to suspect that the trees he managed were doing far more than standing still and growing. In The Hidden Life of Trees he gathers the science and his own long observation into a single, gently astonishing argument: that a forest is…
Is The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate worth reading?: We scored The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate 4.5 out of 5. Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees reveals the forest as a cooperative, communicating community, where trees share food, warn of danger, and care for their young. A warm, wonder-filled book that changes how you walk through the woods.