You keep an old forest. Your only tool is absence.
Fell one tree each year. Where the gap opens, light finds the floor — and forty years of real succession run in your hands.
a 40-year game of gardening by subtraction alone
Each year you survey the canopy. Every cell holds one tree, or none — light finds the floor only where a tree is gone.
You fell exactly one tree. That's the whole verb. No planting, no watering — the forest does the rest with the light you give it.
Light-loving pioneers race into open gaps. Shade-tolerant trees hold their ground in the dark. Seeds only take root where there's light enough for their kind.
One tree at the center is the ancient oak. Its line — the seedlings descended from it — needs real sun to ever reach the canopy. Its rivals do better shaded.
Forty years, forty gaps. At the end you get the forest's portrait — and the ancient oak's story, whatever it became.
Share the forest you kept: