Das Leben der Mächtigen

If trees could speak, what would they tell us? Zora del Buono has set out to listen to the stories of the oldest trees in Europe and North America, some of which are thousands of years old. She visits the Ankerwycke Yew, under which Anne Boleyn first met her later husband and executioner Henry VIII, admires the Thick Marie in Berlin, which once served as a playground for the Humboldt brothers and as a shade provider for Goethe, before Hermann Göring designated it as a natural monument. She also treks through a snowstorm in a Swedish bog to see the oldest tree in the world, a 9,500-year-old specimen that looks as poignantly small and thin as a forgotten Christmas tree. On her travels, she meets Native Americans, foresters, and tree caretakers – as well as a classmate of the drug-addicted woman who has a 3,600-year-old swamp cypress.