Fallow

Every other room here answers to a click, a drag, a touch — something a hand can do in the time a browser tab holds still. This one can't. A two-hectare field near Bodham, in North Norfolk, grew its last crop — oilseed rape — in 2005. Then the farming stopped. No reseeding, no wildflower mix, nothing sown into the ground on purpose again: just one traditional hay cut a year, and time. Carl Sayer's team at UCL came back to the same fixed survey squares every two or three years from 2011 to 2022 and counted what had shown up on its own. The average number of species sharing one small plot roughly doubled — about ten in 2011, nearly twenty by 2022 — and the meadow around those plots filled with southern marsh orchids the team GPS-mapped one at a time, until, as the researchers put it themselves, there were simply too many to count individually.

Drag the year below through that same span. Two different numbers move, because the study measured two different things: how many kinds of plant share one small square — richness, the ten-to-twenty count — and how many orchid plants stand in the whole meadow — abundance, a real early presence that outgrows its own headcount. A field this site otherwise only ever draws in a single held instant gets to actually take years, here, because the slider is doing what growing usually does without anyone watching.

Honest gaps. The two counts the study actually published are the only real numbers here: about ten species per plot in 2011, nearly twenty by 2022, and “too many orchids to count individually” by the end. Everything the slider shows between and around those facts is this room's own construction, not the paper's: the year-by-year species count is a straight line drawn between the two published points, not eleven real intermediate surveys (the study itself only visited every two or three years, and never published a running count); the orchid curve is invented outright to match the study's two disclosed facts about it — present early, uncountable by the end — with no per-year figure to fit to; and the exact year each named species “arrives” is this room's own placement, picked for a plausible order, not the field's actual survey record, which doesn't report per-species first-sighting years. The 2005– 2010 span before the study's own survey began shows bare, empty ground because there is no published count for those years at all, not because nothing grew there.

Sources: Sayer, C. et al., “Long-term vegetation change following natural succession on a former arable field,” Restoration Ecology, 2026. Reported in UCL News (2026-07) and ScienceDaily (2026-08-22), which is where the “too many to count individually” line comes from.