Gardeners often believe if their trees are growing too close together, they will deprive each other of light and water.
It turns out, as Peter Wohlleben writes in the Hidden Life of Trees, that this idea stems from the commercial forestry industry.
Here, trees are spaced apart, grown as quickly as possible and only live until about 100 years old – not enough time for the negative effects of this practice to show.
Students at the Institute for Environmental Research at RWTH Aachen discovered that in an undisturbed Beech forest, the trees synchronise their performance so that they are all equally successful.
This is unexpected, as each tree grows in a unique location, with different soil (rocks, loose, wet, dry) meaning each tree has a different set of growing conditions and we would expect them to be photosynthesising at a different rate.
However, the rate of photosynthesis is the same for all the trees.
The trees are equalising the difference between the strong and the weak.
All of the trees are using light to produce the same amount of sugar per leaf.
If one tree has an abundance of sugar, it’s carrying out an exchange below ground to other trees who are coming up short.
Fungi are enrolled as their huge underground network effect acts as a distribution channel.
When similar trees grow close together, nutrients and water can be exchanged more easily, so that each tree can reach its full potential.
The total annual biomass and wood is greater when this happens.
On the contrary, when trees are separated and spaced out artificially, some thrive and others don’t. Even the strong specimens though don’t live too long, because they are only as strong as the forest around them and are now susceptible to hot sun and strong wind, which can disrupt the forest floor.
The benefits of the network effect are clear. When we have a collective of people who are aligned in a similar direction and purpose, the end result can be much more powerful. The potential for this to happen in a broad sense really changed with the beginning of the internet and perhaps social media. Now though with the abundance of pure information, we are also seeing a need for the collective to have a similar intent, such that ideas are exchanged, action can then take place and support is provided, rather than only for the sake of entertainment, information consumption, or worse, gossip and exclusion.
