avery_jackson•1mo agoTop Commenter

Always laughed at guys who talked about tree sex, then saw my maple do the tango

I thought the whole concept of trees communicating through roots was pure hippie nonsense. My neighbor kept going on about it at the shop, and I just nodded politely while thinking about my lunch. Then last spring I had to trench for a new water line about 30 feet from an old sugar maple I'd been nursing back to health. Cut through some roots, nothing major. Within a week that maple dropped half its leaves and looked like it was giving up. A certified arborist buddy came by, pointed at the trench, and said I basically cut the tree's internet. He showed me how the roots from that maple connected to three other trees on my property, and those trees started yellowing too. I dug up a root connection and saw these weird fungal threads linking everything together. Three months later after some compost tea and careful watering, the maple bounced back. Has anyone else seen this root network thing happen in a residential setting?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyj111mo ago

That 30 foot distance is what gets me because it makes you realize how big these networks actually are. I had a similar thing happen with my backyard oaks back in 2018 when I put in a new patio. I dug about two feet deep near this old red oak and then the two younger oaks about 20 feet away started looking droopy. My gardening buddy who's been at it for 40 years said it's like the whole neighborhood is one big family under the ground. I've noticed this pattern in other places too like how my town's old maple lined streets all seem to get sick at the same time even if they're blocks apart. It makes me wonder if we're just scratching the surface of how connected things really are in ways we can't see.

holly_reed551mo ago

Totally, they're probably trading stuff we can't even measure yet.

ninaowens1mo ago

You said 'the whole neighborhood is one big family under the ground' and that really stuck with me... I keep wondering what happens when you have two totally different species, like a maple and a pine, growing right next to each other. Do they still link up through the same fungal network or is it like a maple-only club under there? I've been reading about how some trees actually send warning signals through these connections, but I'm skeptical about how much info actually gets passed around between different types of trees.