# A compost heap in section is a picture of time > A compost heap drawn in vertical section, eight bands running from coarse at the top to nearly uniform at the bottom, turns years of slow rotting into a single readable gradient. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/compost-heap-layers Eight bands, stacked, running the full width of the shirt. The top one is coarse and open — you can see individual pieces in it. Each band down from there is a little darker and a little finer than the one above. By the bottom, there's almost no texture left at all, just one even, dark band. Nothing was added between the top and the bottom. Only time was, and the drawing has no other way to show it than by getting quieter as it goes down. ## What is this section actually showing? A single heap, cut open, with its oldest material at the bottom and its newest at the top. Everything on a compost heap gets added the same way, on top, whenever there's something to add. So a vertical cut through it is also a cut through time — the top band is whatever went on this month, and the bottom band is whatever went on furthest back, having spent the longest being broken down by everything above it. ## Why does the texture get finer the further down you look? Because the only thing separating the top of a heap from the bottom is how long it's had things living in it, eating it, and turning it into something else. There's no recipe being followed layer by layer — no turning schedule drawn into the picture, no activator added at a specific band. It's the same material, at the top and the bottom, at two very different points in the same slow process, and the gradient from coarse to fine is the only visible evidence that the process happened at all. ## What makes a well-drawn section more honest than a tidy one? Keeping every band a genuinely different texture from its neighbours, rather than eight identical stripes with a colour gradient laid over them. A heap drawn as flat colour bands would be a chart pretending to be compost. One where each band carries its own distinct marks — recognisable fragments up top, indistinct crumb further down — is closer to what a real cut heap looks like, and the loss of recognisable shape from band to band is the entire point being made. ## Who owns the idea of drawing something in cross-section? Nobody, and neither does anyone own a compost heap's particular gradient of texture — it's a description of a natural process, not a design anybody invented. The convention of showing structure by slicing through it belongs to technical drawing generally, used the same way in botany, geology and engineering long before anyone put one on a shirt. Nothing here needs permission from anybody. ## Does the same idea of a hidden gradient work somewhere else in a garden? Anywhere material is added at the top over time and only reveals its age once it's cut open — [three bags of leaves at different heights, each with a year on the tape](/stories/leaf-mould-year-bags) make the same argument sideways instead of downward, because leaf mould doesn't get topped up the way a heap does. What's specific to a heap in section is that it's still one continuous object rather than several — [a soil profile cut for the same reason](/stories/soil-profile-cutaway) shows layers that took far longer to form and were never disturbed by anyone adding to the top of them. ## Isn't rotting vegetable matter an odd thing to want on a shirt? Only if the heap gets pictured as rubbish rather than as what it actually becomes — the material at the bottom of this section is close to finished, dark and crumbled, on its way back into a bed rather than out to a bin. The coarse band at the top is what most people picture when they hear compost heap; the fine, dark one at the bottom is what the heap is actually for, and it's the band most people never see because it's buried under everything more recent than it. It ends up back on [a potting bench, worked into new pots](/stories/potting-bench-from-above), which is the part the section leaves off the bottom edge of the shirt. ## Does it print well? Yes — eight distinct bands with their own internal texture give a print plenty of visual interest without needing any gradient shading, which fabric handles badly anyway. Cream carries the coarse top band's individual fragments; brown and a near-black ink take over further down as the texture simplifies, so the print gets genuinely quieter as the eye moves down the shirt rather than just changing colour. Keep the band boundaries as hard horizontal lines — they're doing the job a soft blend can't. ## How do I get one made? Describe the heap at [JustOG](/) — how many bands, how coarse the top should read, and which colours carry which depth. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Eight bands, one heap, and nothing added between the top of it and the bottom except however long it's been standing there.