Born 1964 in Bonn. Studied forestry and spent over twenty years as a conventional forester for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate — planting, thinning, harvesting according to the German industrial forestry tradition he was trained in.
Then he started to doubt the method. He began to manage a municipal forest in the Eifel mountains along old-growth principles — no heavy machinery, no clearcutting, individual trees respected. Output stayed high. The forest thrived. People began visiting.
The Hidden Life of Trees (2015), written in the voice of a practitioner not a theorist, translated a generation of mycorrhizal research into public language. The book has sold millions of copies and helped shift how ordinary people walk into a forest.
The Hidden Life of Trees
The book that revealed trees communicate, support each other, and form communities — the science of forest intelligence, accessibly told. Changed how millions see forests.