'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