Understory is an independent field journal — quarterly in print, weekly online — about the smaller weathers of the Bohemian forest. We have been making it since the spring of 2023. We don't intend to stop.
We walk in the woods. We write down what we noticed. We take a small number of photographs, on film when we can, and we develop them slowly. Once a season we collect what we have made into a softcover journal, printed in Praha on recycled cotton paper, and send it to anyone who has asked.
Between issues we publish a single field note each Sunday, by email and on this website, free to read. There are no advertisements. There are no sponsored walks. Nothing here is trying to sell you a backpack.
Almost everything in Understory is recorded within a forty-kilometre radius of the village of Hřensko, in the north of the Czech Republic — a region of sandstone gorges, slow rivers, and very old forest known locally as České Švýcarsko, or Bohemian Switzerland. It is one of the smaller national parks in Europe and one of the densest on a per-square-metre basis. We have been walking it for about eight years between us. We still do not know it.
Understory moves slowly on purpose. A typical entry takes between four and ten hours to walk and another two days to write. We do not publish reactively. We do not chase news. The wood does not have news. The wood has weather, and seasons, and small daily facts that we are trying to be more careful about noticing.
Because the wood is slower than a screen. Because the things we are trying to write about cannot really be skimmed. Because paper takes the photographs better. And because a quarterly object in the hand of a reader is, in our experience, more likely to be returned to than an article in a browser tab. We make the printed journal small enough to fit in a coat pocket on a walk.
Anna founded Understory in 2023 after a long winter spent re-reading Pliny the Younger in a cabin near Hřensko. She walks most of the entries herself. She writes the slower ones.
Tomáš shoots on a 1979 Pentax MX and develops in a cupboard in his apartment in Praha. He has not used digital since 2017. He thinks digital is fine. He is just slower without it.
Lena sets the quarterly print issues on a 1962 Heidelberg Windmill in a small print-shop in Děčín. She also draws the leaf illustrations that appear in the margins of every issue, in pencil, from life.
Petr is the reason we know the names of any of the mosses, birds, or trees we write about. He has been working in Bohemian Switzerland for twenty-three years. He answers our questions slowly and exactly.
Tess runs the cabin near Mezní Louka where we stay before the longer walks. Júra is her dog. Júra has been on more of the entries than any of the rest of us. He is on the masthead.
We open a short submissions window once a year, in February. We are looking, mostly, for people who are willing to walk the same place several times. If that sounds like you, please write.
We believe that paying attention to a small piece of land for a long time is a serious thing to do — that it changes the person doing it, slowly and permanently — and that the change is good. That is the whole of what we are about. The journal is just the record we keep along the way.
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”— Robin Wall Kimmerer · Braiding Sweetgrass
We read every message ourselves, slowly, usually in the evening at the cabin. Whether it's a question, a submission, a hello, or a printed-issue request — write to us, and we'll write back.
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