Brandywine Forest Field Notes An old oak stands on a dry slope above a Chester County stream, its lower limbs long gone, its bark thick and fire-blackened at the base by nothing more recent than lightning or a long-ago brush pile. A woodland nearby has an oddly open understory, a scattering of warm-season grasses at its edge, a meadow that seems to resist the forest's advance. It is easy to read scenes like this as untouched — a wilderness that existed in some pure, static fo