The poem reads like a short walk through a patch of woods, noted in quick glimpses. It starts small, with rainwater held in a raccoon's footprint, then widens to a stream, Plummer's Hollow Run, and a deer fence. Past the fence the landscape changes suddenly: thick shrubs and wildflowers, kept safe from deer for nearly two decades. The speaker seems pleased, even amused, by how lush it has become.
The wordplay is where the mood lightens. "This plot thickens" works both as a literal description of a crowded plot of land and as the old phrase for a story getting more interesting. Then the poem names Smilax, a thorny plant, and offers a bit of folk-sounding gossip that her prickliness drove a man "wildflowery," a playful, slightly mad coinage. The tone is quiet, observant, and gently humorous. The speaker doesn't lecture about conservation. He lets the contrast between browsed ground and protected ground speak for itself, and finds a little joke in the thorns.