Red cedar seedlings only establish during rare canopy gaps occurring about twice a century.

Evidence

While adult trees are tolerant of the various stresses that an always changing world throws their way, the young are quite vulnerable. Red cedar grows more slowly than the other species who quickly overtop it and steal the sun—especially after a fire or logging, it is almost entirely outcompeted by species better adapted to the dry, open conditions. If red cedars do survive, despite being the most shade tolerant of all the western species, they do not flourish but rather bide their time, waiting for a windthrow or a death to punch a hole in the shade. Given the opportunity, they climb that transient shaft of sunlight, step by step, making their way to the canopy. But most never do. Forest ecologists estimate that the window of opportunity for cedars to get started occurs perhaps only twice in a century. So at Shotpouch, natural recolonization was out. In order to have cedars in the restored forest, Franz had to plant them. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1063

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘waiting for a windthrow to punch a hole in the shade’ image deepens the patience/listening method threaded through the polyad’s reading-the-landscape course.