Old Wounds (Conifer bark)

In this wound on a planted conifer, we witness both trauma and healing made visible. The tree's response to injury has created an abstract landscape of resin flows and color transitions - amber, ochre, and deep burgundy bleeding into patterns that speak of both damage and recovery. Through my macro lens, this scar becomes a map of resilience, where crystallised sap forms topographies of healing. There's profound irony here: these conifers, planted to quickly hide industrial scars, carry their own wounds and healing processes. Like the land itself, like the mining communities who worked it, these marks tell stories of both injury and survival. The tree's slow repair, its patient laying down of resin barriers year after year, offers a different testimony about recovery - one that doesn't hide its wounds but transforms them into something both protective and beautiful. This is how genuine healing often looks: not a complete erasure of what happened, but an honest incorporation of damage into new forms of being.