Crown Shyness: The Gap Between Neighbours
Look straight up in certain forests and the canopy is drawn with a hand's width of sky between every tree.
In some stands the leaves stop before they touch. Look up in a plantation of camphor, in eucalyptus, in lodgepole pine, and the crowns hold apart by ten to fifty centimetres, so the sky comes through as a network of thin channels that follow the outline of each tree. Foresters call it crown shyness, and the name is older than the explanation. The gaps are consistent enough that you can trace one tree's property line overhead without knowing which trunk it belongs to.
Two mechanisms are usually offered, and both are probably at work. In wind-exposed stands the outer twigs simply abrade each other, and the buds that would extend a branch get knocked off before they open; you can find the scuffed tips on the ground after a gale. The other is optical: a leaf reads the far-red light reflected off a neighbour's foliage as a warning that the space ahead is already taken, and growth turns elsewhere. One is mechanical damage, the other is a plant reading the colour of the light and declining.
Photographed from below, it is one of the few forest subjects that is genuinely flat. Everything sits at roughly the same distance from the lens, so the whole frame stays sharp, and the picture organises itself into two tones: the green that crowds in and the pale seam that will not close. On a screen that seam is what does the work, because it gives the eye a path to follow without asking it to look at anything in particular.
