"Most of the world's plants - more than 90 percent of the known species - are connected by a vast subterranenan network of fungal filaments, in a symbiotic association that goes to the very origin of the plants, 400 million years ago. These fungal filaments are essential for the plants' well-being, acting as living conduits for the transmission of water and essential minerals (and perhaps also organic compounds) not only between the plants and fungi but from plant to plant. Without this "fragile gossamer-like net" of fungal filaments, David Wolfe writes in Tales from the Underground, "the towering redwoods, oaks, pines and eucalyptus of our forests would collapse during the hard times." And so too would much of agriculture, for these fungal filaments often provide links between very different species - between legumes and cereals, for instance, or between alders and pines. Thus nitrogen-rich legumes and alders do not merely enrich the soil as they die and decompose, but can directly donate, through the fungal network, a good portion of their nitrogen to nearby plants. United by these multifarious underground channels (and also by the chemicals they secrete in the air to signal sexual readiness or news of predator attack, etc.), plants are not as solitary as one might imagine, but form complex, interactive, mutually supportive communities."
From Oliver Sacks' Oaxaca Journal
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