Loam maps a restored creek by elevation, not by feed. Every plot is staked to the ground, surveyed season after season, until the canopy closes over the water.
Three moves carry the whole language. They stack like contour intervals — each one staked to the same root-line that runs down the page.
Sections are elevation bands. A faint contour field runs behind them so the page reads as terrain you survey, never a stack of identical panels.
A root-line stems down each list, and a node anchors every plot to its band — so a transect reads like plantings along the creek.
Sienna is reserved for the few sites that need a steward this season. Spread thin, it keeps meaning the moment you see it.
Log each plot on a single root-line transect — what you planted, what survived, what the water did since the last walk.
Track the creek's flow against the dry-year line in slate-water, so a falling channel surfaces before the soil bakes.
The page flags the handful of sites that can't wait — eroding cutbanks, drying seeps — and quiets everything established.
You don't restore a creek in a quarter. You read the same ground for ten years and stake what changed.
Loam is the field journal for the land you've decided to stay with. Start a transect and watch the canopy close.