Last May, I stood below a Montezuma Cypress tree in Tule, Mexico, near Oaxaca. El Tule is known as the world’s widest tree with a circumference of 137.8 feet.

The breadth and canopy of this tree is so extraordinary that it’s hard to believe it all came from one seed, but DNA tests have shown that it is indeed one tree. Its age is unknown, with estimates ranging between 1,200 and 3,000 years, and even one claim of 6,000 years. Local Zapotec legend holds that it was planted about 1,400 years ago by Pechocha, a priest of the Aztec wind god Ehecatl.

I simply listened to the birds, in awe of this living organism that survived centuries of drought, floods, and earthquakes. The gratitude and respect I felt for this tree was overwhelming.

1. Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

“How had the trees weathered the changing cycles of growth and dormancy, and how did this compare to the joys and hardships my family had endured in a fraction of the time?”

― Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her research of more than three decades as a “forest detective” is recognised worldwide. She is said to be the inspiration for the heroine in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory and James Cameron’s ‘Tree of Souls’ in Avatar. Her TED talks, including 2016’s “How Trees Talk to Each Other”, have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

In her 2022 debut book Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne shares the secrets of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their cooperation, healing capacity, memory, wisdom and sentience. As her remarkable journey shows us, science is not a realm apart from ordinary life, but deeply connected with our humanity.

In Finding the Mother Tree, she reveals how the complex cycle of forest life – on which we rely for our existence – offers profound lessons about resilience and kinship and must be preserved before it’s too late.

“Simard writes – in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways – how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies – and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.”

2. How to Think Like a Tree: The natural principles guide to life by Sarah Spencer

“Every tree that has ever lived has changed the planet and left it a better place than when it started out.” ― Sarah Spencer, Think like a tree: The natural principles guide to life

Published in 2019, How to Think like a Tree is the first guide of its kind, reveals the underlying principles of nature’s secrets of success one by one, and demonstrates how we can apply them to our own lives, in this practical personal development guide.

Drawing on woodland examples from around the globe, Think like a Tree shares the amazing abilities of trees, their, evolutionary success stories and their abilities to heal.

Author Sarah Spencer is passionate about trees. She lives on a smallholding in the National Forest in Derbyshire in the centre of the UK with her family, and loves growing vegetables, fruit and flowers. She manages a woodland that she designed and planted.We associate trees and woodlands with harmony, health and vitality. And yet, so often, we struggle to experience these qualities in our everyday live

3. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

“When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with larger machines.” ― Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World

 In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware. Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group. As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group.

Drawing on groundbreaking new discoveries, Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.