Understory

What interested me was the space beneath. The understory — or the near-absence of one. The vertical columns of trunks determine everything that happens below them. Light is rationed. Most things can't grow. The floor has bracken where gaps exist, fallen wood everywhere, moss on whatever stays damp. In January that's most of it.

I pointed the camera upward from the base of the trunks — the trunks stretching up with backlighting, the canopy somewhere above them, the density of the forest making the upper portions hazy. Then down: young conifer saplings and bracken among fallen wood, the regeneration working in the margins where the canopy has thinned.

The plantation produces a specific visual rhythm. Straight trunks at regular intervals, receding in every direction, the light dappling through in patterns that repeat. It's not a natural woodland. The geometry is too regular. But the understorey accumulates naturally — the deadfall, the moss, the ferns — and that tension between planted geometry and organic decay is the thing worth photographing.

The last frame is outside the plantation: a solitary windswept tree silhouetted on the moorland ridge above Stockhill, grey sky behind it. Nothing around it for a long way. The Mendips in winter, beyond the treeline, doing what they do.