They’re gems in the woods—big trees resting hidden by scores of skinny ones. Our goal is to strip away the younger plants and reveal those awe-inspiring oaks and others and give them a chance to get even more majestic. It’s the 200-year plan for managing our forests.

As we walked along a path on the high ground above Hillers Creek yesterday, Henry noticed this white oak. It’s not one of the really big ones, but it has a good start. So cutting a few smaller trees around it will help a lot. If you watched the treehouse coming down on an earlier blog post, you saw an old red oak that had decayed.  The white oaks, on the other hand, have the possibility of really long lives. They’re the trees that will be here when we’re long gone.