Book Review: Entangled Life
This blog is from a previous Exmouth Garden Club newsletter, written by former Chair of the club, Mike Wheeler.
Back in the autumn 2020 newsletter I wrote about a book entitled The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, where the author talked about the communication between trees via fungi in the soil. He shared some of the observations he had made of the support of weak trees by larger trees and how trees warned each other about pest attacks.
Entangled Life also talks about the Wood Wide Web, as it has become known, but takes things many steps further along the path of fungal communication and dominance. The author has studied fungal networks since his PhD at Cambridge on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama. Fungi are smart – like the truffle fungus that produces an aroma which is irresistible to pigs and some dogs. They are also lethal – like the zombie fungus that invades the carpenter ant and then controls its brain. All this is in order to spread its spores efficiently. He discusses the problems fungi have when the hyphae of one fungus encounters those of another fungus and how they seem to solve these potentially threatening situations. Sheldrake also discusses how plants and their fungal partners can influence plant flavour or their attractiveness to bees or even the number of berries per plant. This book is full of amazing facts about fungi and their communication with each other and the world around them. They also hold the record for the largest living organism in the world, a honey fungus, Armillaria ostoyae, which covers 965 hectares. The book is packed with wonderful descriptions of fungi and their hosts and is definitely worth reading. By the way, don’t forget they also live inside of you. Perhaps they’re controlling our brains!
Others also think this is a wonderful book. It has been nominated for a host of prizes and was selected as Book of the Year in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Time. It has been translated into twenty languages so no excuse not to read it!
Entangled Life
Merlin Sheldrake
Vintage Publishing
