A forest, in Peter Wohlleben’s telling, is not a collection of solitary trees but a society. They nurse their sick, warn each other of danger, and feed their young through a vast underground network of fungi that a scientist once nicknamed the wood wide web. Wohlleben’s 2015 bestseller sold millions and changed how a generation walks through a wood. It is a beautiful story, told by a German forester who plainly loves trees. It is also, in its most famous claims, some distance ahead of the evidence.

Start with what is true, because a good deal of it is. Trees really do form intimate partnerships with fungi. Fine fungal threads wrap around and enter tree roots, drawing water and nutrients from the soil and passing them to the tree, taking sugars in return, and shielding the roots from disease. Those relationships, called mycorrhizas, are real, ancient and essential, and forests genuinely could not exist without them. Wohlleben’s deeper achievement is one of feeling. He persuaded millions of readers that a forest is a living, interdependent community worth protecting, which is both scientifically defensible and quietly urgent.

The trouble begins when the fungi start doing the things the book most loves. In 2023, three biologists, Justine Karst, Melanie Jones and Jason Hoeksema, published a review in Nature Ecology and Evolution examining the popular story. Their verdict was sobering. The claim that these networks are widespread across forests, they found, is not well supported, because too few forests have been mapped and field results vary wildly. The claim that trees pump resources to struggling seedlings through the network is shakier still, with alternative explanations left unexamined. And the most cherished idea of all, that a mother tree deliberately sends food and warning signals to her own offspring, has no peer-reviewed evidence behind it whatsoever.

Worse, the authors showed how the science itself had drifted. Tracking citations, they found researchers increasingly quoting these studies as if they proved more than they did, so that a tentative finding hardened, through sheer repetition, into an accepted fact.

None of this makes Wohlleben a fraud, and the scientists are careful to say so. Karst’s own words are worth keeping: they did not want to kill anyone’s wonder about the forest, only to tamp down the misinformation. The fungi are real. The partnership is real. What runs ahead of the evidence is the story layered on top, the forest as a conscious, caring family, which owes as much to human longing as to fieldwork.

So keep the wonder and hold the certainty lightly. ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ is best read as a work of enchantment grounded in real biology rather than a settled account of how forests behave. Its instinct, that trees are connected and a forest is more than the sum of its trunks, may well prove true as better studies arrive. For now, the honest position is the more interesting one. We are only beginning to understand what happens beneath our feet, and the mystery is larger than the story we told ourselves to fill it.