The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell review – looking and listening in the forest

In The Baron in the Trees, the 1957 comic masterpiece by Italo Calvino, the hero abandons the life of a petty 18th-century aristocrat to spend his life in the boughs and branches of the forests of Liguria. Over the years his senses become ever more finely attuned to the life of the woodland until he hears “the sap running through the cells, the circles marking the years inside the trunks … the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests … the caterpillar waking and the chrysalis opening”.

Trekking into the rainforest at the heart of the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve in western Ecuador, the biologist David George Haskell enters a similar state. As the rain falls, he notes in the first pages of The Songs of Trees, botanical diversity is sonified:

In the very long run, a warmer planet could be good for the trees