Today Radio 4
Liveline RTÉ Radio 1
It’s official, trees care for each other says forester Peter Wohlleben.
He sounded like an honest woodcutter from a fairytale – but I believed him.
In his new book, The Hidden Life of Trees, he talks about how trees can register pain, learn things and even protect and look after each other.
He was interviewed for the Today programme. Trees communicate through their roots and fungal networks, he told listeners.
A mother tree can recognise whether a little tree is its own child or a stranger tree.
Tree children are suckled by their mothers just like human babies, he said.
They send information about insect attacks not just to their children but to their neighbouring trees via fungal networks.
Scientists call it the wood-wide web and, no, he was not joking. He was serious and probably right and wise as the oaks and sycamores he studies.
A relative of the young woman, Kiara Baird, who died in a car accident in Donegal recently, was interviewed by Joe Duffy on Liveline about her anger at a newspaper report and photographs from the funeral.
Samantha Courtney said the family’s privacy had been invaded at a time of distress.
Referring to the journalist who took photos of the funeral, she told Joe: “I saw him over the wall in the bushes and trees with a camera.
“We are all absolutely shocked. You don’t expect this at a young girl’s funeral. To take those photographs and place them wherever he chose to, we are all upset.
“He came and took those pictures where everybody was at their most vulnerable.”
It is a dilemma that anyone who has worked as a journalist faces at some point.
You do your best to get it right and be sensitive and, at times, it can be very difficult.
Joe Duffy was sympathetic but balanced, pointing out that the press council has ruled that funerals are public events.
The papers made the decision to run the pictures too, he said.
