''Full of wonder and revelation ... Highly recommended'' Sue Stuart-Smith, author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Well Gardened Mind

Taking us on an awe-inspiring journey through deep history and across the globe, The Genius of Trees restores trees to their rightful position not as victims of our negligence but as ingenious, stunningly inventive agents in a grand ecological narrative.

Some have been using fire as a reproductive tool since prehistoric times. Others have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their fruits reach large primates, who can spread their seeds over vast distances, while poisoning smaller and less useful mammals. Some can split solid rock and create fertile ground in barren landscapes, effectively building entire ecosystems from scratch. For the first time, we witness the inventive and astonishing ways trees sculpt and even master their environment and understand the science of how they achieve these feats.

From oaks growing in Devon and Amedi in Iraq to the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands, metasequoias in California and fossil forests preserved from hundreds of millions of years ago, we see how trees not only farm the landscape in which they grow but also manipulate the fundamental elements, other species and even humankind to achieve their ends.

At once transporting and expert, this eye-opening, mind-expanding journey into the inner lives of nature’s most powerful plant is a profoundly new and original way of understanding both the miracles trees perform and the glories of our natural world.

'An exceptional book' ROBIN LANE FOX

'This wondrous book gives us trees as we've never seen them before ... Beautifully explained, brilliantly written and perception-changing' ISABELLA TREE

The Genius of Trees tells a mind-expanding global story revealing the inventive and astonishing ways trees learned to shape our natural world.

Over hundreds of millions of years, from prehistoric forests to the trees around us today, we see trees using fire as a reproductive tool, harnessing large mammals to spread their seeds (but poisoning smaller, less useful mammals), and splitting rock to create fertile ground in barren landscapes.

Because trees, we discover, manipulate fundamental elements, plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and even humankind to achieve their ends. From the laurel cloud-forests of the Canary Islands to the magnificent sex-shifting oaks of Iraq, from the giant sequoias of California to the carbon-spinning junipers of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border trees sculpt their environments.

At once transporting and expert, this profoundly original exploration of the science of trees is a startlingly new way of understanding these glories of our natural world.

The Genius of Trees gives us hope for the future. It enables us to see trees, for the first time, not as victims but as agents of change in a grand ecological narrative and as leading actors in the great drama of life on earth.

'Full of wonder and revelation ... Highly recommended' SUE STUART-SMITH

'If I was dazzled by nature and in awe of trees before, I now know how much we are indebted to them for the way they have shepherded life on earth for millions on years' KIRSTY WARK