Secret Wood

If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old, this is a political act and exactly what Roots wants to achieve with Secret Wood.

We took inspiration from the novel written by Italian writer Dino Buzzati, this novel tells a story of a general who is about to cut down an old forest for the sake of financial gain, but discover that the forest is inhabited by invisible spirits. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods.