Think about that the next time you break off a healthy branch. So not only can buds “see,” but if trees are counting days, they must also have a memory. For example, beeches only begin growing once it is light for at least 13 hours a day. How do trees know when to leaf out? How do they avoid getting faked out by premature bursts of warm weather? “They wait until a certain number of warm days have passed, and only then do they trust that all is well and classify the warm phase,” writes Wohlleben. Apparently trees can count-and remember things. Parent trees nourish their saplings through roots, and with the help of symbiotic fungi, roots connect neighboring trees to share nutrients and warnings about threats. When you walk in the woods, there’s a network beneath your feet. Trees help one another through a “wood-wide web.” To give you a taste of the kind of fascinating facts he reveals, here are the ten coolest secrets we learned from Wohlleben about trees. We can’t wait to plunge into his new book, The Weather Detective: Rediscovering Nature’s Secret Signs, which was released this week. So imagine our delight when we discovered the best-selling book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben. Then there’s the historic Charter Oak on our hunt in Hartford, Connecticut, and an ancient mulberry tree outside a historic house on our Annapolis hunt, and…we could go on. On the Babson College campus outside of Boston, teams must locate an apple tree that descends from the very tree Isaac Newton sat under when falling fruit prompted his “eureka!” moment. In another Washington Square in New York City’s Greenwich Village, our hunt points out the “Hangman’s Elm,” which legend (inaccurately) says helped execute criminals back in colonial times. In Philadelphia’s Washington Square, we send hunters in search of the tree that grew from seeds that traveled into space and back with an Apollo mission. That’s just one of the reasons we love to feature trees on our outdoor scavenger hunts.

Mother Nature’s masterful sculptures are right by the curb or the park bench, but they are so often and so easily overlooked. You don’t have to head to a museum to see an impressive work of art.

The hidden life of trees