The Genius of Trees
  • Published: 7 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529941210
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00

The Genius of Trees

How trees mastered the elements and shaped the world

  • Harriet Rix
Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
25 Nov 2025
Hardback
7 Sep 2025
EBook
7 Aug 2025
Audiobook
7 Aug 2025
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A mesmerising, mind-expanding global story which shows how trees have learned to use the soil, air, water, plants, fungi, fire, animals and people around them to shape our world - possessing 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 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.
  • Published: 7 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529941210
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00
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Praise for The Genius of Trees

A compelling journey of a book, full of wonder and revelation. Highly recommended

Sue Stuart-Smith, author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Well Gardened Mind

You will forever love trees after you read this wonderful book. Not only is the text brilliant, but the author is genius. Harriet Rix's stories range from why sloths are shaped by trees to be greenish in colour, to the chemical secrets of chocolate trees, to how one fragile moth pollinates the Joshua trees. You will want to read this book again and again

Meg Lowman, aka Canopy Meg, author of The Arbornaut

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

Kirsty Wark, television presenter and journalist

An exceptional book. Up to date scientifically, beautifully clear for all of us, it changes our entire view of trees while carrying us to other worlds and times. Enchantingly written, it has personal touches which unite science, travel and fine literature and lead us by the hand through woods we never understood before

Robin Lane Fox, historian and gardening correspondent for the Financial Times

A wondrous spreading canopy of a book that gives us trees as we’ve never seen them before: as dynamic forces, founders of our world, and agents of their own destiny - as well as ours. This is science writing at its best - beautifully explained, brilliantly written and perception-changing

Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

Fascinating and evocative, an intimate ride into the magical world of trees. This book contains everything you ever wanted to know - and so much you never knew you wanted to know - about these incredible organisms

Chris Fitch, author of Wild Cities

Trees are not passive passengers in Earth’s story; they are the engineers of life itself. The Genius of Trees is a rare blend of science and wonder, reminding us just how much we still have to learn from these ancient organisms. Harriet Rix captures their wonder with clarity and awe

Thomas Crowther, Ecologist and Climate Scientist

A magisterial tour de force. Rix packs in several lifetimes of science into this sweeping story of the amazing genius of trees. I learned so much. Surely destined to become a classic

Ben Rawlence, author of The Treeline