The glade is empty of trees. The grass grows green and the soil is rich and soft; the sun burns as strongly here as it does in many other places where trees have grown. The answer is not microscopic. No fungi or bacteria hide in the dirt waiting to crack open seeds or burn roots. There is no lake here, drowning terrestrial plants. A large tree doesn't dominate the clearing, vitreous clouds of leaves billowing above the other, lesser trees, roots spreading wide and denying competitors. There isn't a breath of magic here, an old wound never healed, a perfect circle of mushrooms, something lost but never forgotten. A squirrel-eating raptor lives here and kills those who might bury nuts to forget about. Other, smaller birds pick relentlessly at the ground for seeds, until the grass appears to grow in tufts rather than forming a fuzzy plane. A human being taught them to do that.
There are many things in the glade, despite the lack of trees and squirrels. The air is a complex and chemically significant cocktail of gases which feels warm and wet in nostrils and on skin, smelling like turned earth and distant decay. Pollen floats in that air, as do pollinating insects. Birdsong shapes the air. Sunlight crashes down in unfaltering silent sheets, faster than anything. Some of it exits the glade, only to find the shadowed eye of the hawk and flee, creating an ominous glint. The grass grows and sways, the worms dig, birds pick at hundreds of shadows to find one seed.
There are many things in the glade, and you can see them, but only vaguely. Your eyes will not settle for long enough, and some weird trick of the humid air and the sun makes it difficult to pick out detail in the flashes you get. Reaching out to any of these things, to feel a millipede run across your hand or tear a clod out of the ground like hair, is an impossibility. All you can do is GO BACK.