The Genius of Trees: Decoding the science behind the secret life of trees

When it comes to trees, ignorance casts a shadow too wide to ignore the science behind them. This book explains how trees shape the world

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

By Harriet Rix

Published by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage

297 pages  ₹999

  In her 2021 book Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit writes, “To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.” Saeculum, of Latin origin, signals a passage of time, a “historical epoch”. 

As Ms Solnit suggests, when it comes to trees, our ignorance often casts a shadow too wide for us to indulge in the science behind their doings. This is where Harriet Rix’s debut book The Genius of Trees: How Trees Mastered the Elements and Shaped the World, long-listed for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, helps. 

Divided into eight chapters, each declaring to readers how trees help shape water, soil, fire, air, fungi, plants, animals and people, the book begins with this admission by the author: “I’ve never been good at saying no.” This attitude took her far and wide, as is evident if one reads the book. But nothing underlines the saeculum aspect of the book other than a discovery that dramatically altered our “understanding of the impact of trees on environment 386 million years ago”. 

In 2019, it was learnt that a tree called Archaeopteris “industrialised” a process of “weathering rocks at a rate no one expected”, making “earth and sending sand particles down into the sea, where they reacted with acidic water, locking down dramatic levels of carbon dioxide”. In terms of timelines, consider this: How long have humans been employing the carbon capture and storage (CCS) method to control industrially emitted carbon dioxide? And when did trees master them? 

Sustaining this line of contemporary findings throughout the book would have worked as well, but Ms Rix combined scientific findings with documented history, enriching her narrative. 

For example, visiting La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands of Spain, the author reflects how “you could see and feel trees manipulating water” on the Garajonay peak. On noticing a species of Laurel, Garoé, which “was a totem to the first peoples of El Hierro, the Bimbache”, she offers readers an explanation of why this tree came to be called the “saint-tree” through the descriptions of “the French explorer Jean de Bethencourt, who landed in the island in 1403”. She also shares how the Shennongjia region of China derived its name. “The Chinese Epic of Darkness tells the story of [the mythical farmer-emperor] Shennong using a rattan ladder, a jia, to climb to the mountain tops, which, when he dropped it, clattered down and transformed into forest,” she writes. 

In several chapters, the author makes exceptional literary connections. For example, she invokes Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines to describe how the “tops of the eucalyptus had been breaking off into fireballs and flying the gale-force winds”. Then she muses: “Whether global warming will fundamentally alter the ability of trees to fire-regulate themselves is a pressing question because it has a bearing on how forests should now be managed.” 

In rare instances, Ms Rix also — perhaps comically — underlines how the too-giving nature of trees can be hazardous as well. She writes, “The irony is that, having removed particles from the air, trees then add their own. Almost 40 per cent of people in Japan now suffer from hay fever, to the extent that they cannot go outside or sleep without medicine.” 

She also talks about efforts to “monitor methane”. Though the “carbon sink in global forests is steady”, the author notes, the ability “of forests to respond flexibly to changing atmospheres shouldn’t be oversimplified”. 

There’s another oversimplification that Ms Rix shares in her book, highlighting how the “poetry of the wood wide web […] outstripped the scientific facts”. A Canadian conservationist, Suzzane Simard, popularised the phrase “wood wide web”, which Ms Rix calls “a perfect branding”, in noting the “mycorrhizal [fungi] networks” that bind trees. But her submission was found to be replete with “confirmation bias”, and peer-reviewed papers revealed that “fewer than half the statements made about the original field studies could be considered accurate”. 

Ms Rix makes another interesting argument. About the trees Ms Simard noted in her bestselling book, Finding the Mother Tree, Ms Rix writes: “The trees she was referring to weren’t female, they were hermaphrodite.” Patricia Westerford, one of the characters of Richard Powers’ award-winning novel The Overstory, may be based on the initial success and later findings against Ms Simard’s observations. But if you prefer the concreteness of scientific facts over the cushioning of fiction without any compromises, then Ms Rix’s book is a great option. 

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The reviewer is a New Delhi-based writer and culture critic