Growth rings

The garden shows one day at a time; the almanac steps back to a month. This steps back further still — every day the garden has been alive, all at once, cut like a real trunk's cross-section. The oldest day is the small core at the center; each day since adds one ring outward, in order, ending at the bark. Nothing here is rolled fresh — every ring reads a fact plant.js already decided for that date, the same read-only discipline the almanac and the visit sky already keep.

A wide ring is a good year for the specimen — it flowered. A narrow ring is a lean one — it grew bare. That is a real dendrochronology convention, not an invented one: a real tree's rings widen in good growing conditions and narrow under stress, which is how foresters read a trunk's whole history from one cut. A real trunk can also skip a ring some years or grow two in a drought's false start — this one never can, since a ring here is a calendar date, not a season a real tree lived through, so every day gets exactly one, always in order.

Color follows season the same way the almanac's calendar does. A small mark on a ring means something else grew that day too: a dot for moss or lichen at the ground line, a caret for a bird in the canopy, a diamond for a bloom that closes at night. Weather leaves its own trace — rain speckles the band, wind streaks it, fog and snow both soften it, the same way each already does to the specimen itself.