The land clears, then quietly grows back
There is a fantasy version of clearing land. You show up, you cut a line through the woods, and the line stays cut. You stand back and admire your open corridor with a cold drink and the satisfied feeling of a man who has defeated nature.
Virginia has notes on this fantasy.
What actually happens is that you clear a stretch of ground, you work your way down to the next stretch, and by the time you look back over your shoulder the first stretch has already decided to become a jungle again. The greenery here does not grow. It commutes. It is waiting for you to turn around.
I have cut the same brush in the same spot more times than I am prepared to admit in public. Multiflora rose, greenbrier, and a cast of vines whose names I have learned mostly while swearing at them. You take out the big stuff with a chainsaw and haul it into piles, and the small stuff simply refills the space like water finding a level.
The honest math is that a stand of hardwoods you can cut once. The undergrowth you cut on a schedule, forever, or at least until the season turns and the ground stops encouraging it. The trees were the easy part. The green at knee height is the actual opponent.
I have made a kind of peace with it. Clearing this land is not a task with an end. It is a relationship, and the land is the more persistent partner. You do not win. You maintain.
So the piles grow, the corridors reopen, and every visit starts with undoing a little of what the last two weeks put back. It is humbling and slightly ridiculous and I would not trade it. The place is alive in a way a finished lawn never is.
- The site cleared, corridor by corridor, opening the lines the build needed.
Finding out how wet the low corner really was.
Become a Founding Guest