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

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION • The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2025 • The Telegraph’s Best Nature Books of 2025 The mesmerizing, mind-expanding global story of how trees have learned to use the soil, air, water, plants, fungi, fire, animals and people around them to shape our world—possessing an agency beyond anything we might have imagined. 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, England, and Amedi in Iraq to the laurel rainforests of the Canary Islands, metasequoias in California to 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 elements, other species and even humans 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.