It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, the secret language of plants.

Next time you go for a walk outside, take a look at everything that's green and growing,

everything with leaves and roots and stems, and imagine that it's all secretly talking.

One can learn things from trees, plants, weeds, blades of grass.

These are all actually our cousins.

Now, if you're not a plant scientist, this might sound kind of crazy.

But in fact, there's a whole world of plant communication

that biologists are just beginning to understand.

You know, I was trained as a forester, and when I went back to become a professor after I'd done quite a bit of this work,

some of the older professors were going, don't listen to this.

This doesn't, you know, this is, well, they use the word bull-f-fuck, right?

Now it's starting to be incorporated in mainstream high school programs. Well, they use the word bull-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-hundred. Suzanne Simard has been part of a quiet revolution in our basic understanding of trees and forests.

Working at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, she's discovered a whole web of underground

communication between trees. To get a sense of what she's found, let's head to our local

arboretum for a walk. Good spot? This is fine, yeah. Okay. What's your background? How did you

get into forestry? So my family came from Quebec and moved across and settled in the inland rainforest of British Columbia.

And my grandfather and my uncles all horse-logged.

Every summer we would spend in the cedar hemlock forests that were so rich and diverse and you know huge playgrounds for kids and it just

became part of me i mean i think i was always wired for forests and wired for earth so it's just a natural

calling let's walk in a little bit if we could so when i've read popular articles or blog posts about your work, the headlines

often say, trees talk. Do you think trees can communicate? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. My work actually

looks at one way that they communicate, and I think there's multiple ways,

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