25-10 - Flipbook - Page 69
October 2025
concept was developed, hundreds. The Netherlands is a hotspot for them too,
and they are also now beginning to spring up across the US. But it is the UK that
has most recently seen an enormous push towards these miniature urban
forests, with hundreds planted since 2020.
As I visit the site alongside these schoolchildren on a beautifully sunny spring
day, I'm also on a kind of hunt. I'm trying to work out how big the benefits of
foresting such tiny areas really are. As it turns out, I've stumbled onto a thorny,
decades-long debate.
A tiny revolution
In many countries, including my home country of Scotland, there is now a
huge effort to try to reforest large areas of land. This tends to concentrate on
large, unbroken patches of land, and with good reason: such forests are
critical for protecting wildlife and human health and have enormous benefits
for carbon storage and water cycling.
But while smaller patches of forest have historically been somewhat
dismissed as useful nature reserves, they do have benefits. One big plus is that
they are easier to fit into
an urban area 3 and thus
be nearer to where most
people
live.
And
emerging evidence is
showing we might have
underestimated
their
benefits for nature too.
At around 200 sq m
(2,200 sq ft), though, tiny
forests are seriously small
even compared to many
urban
forests.
They
involve around 600 trees
being densely planted all
at the same time in a heavily prepared soil. Ross Woodside, head of
operations at Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust, the local delivery
partner for this wee forest, points out to me some of the 18 different species
planted here, from broom bushes to wild cherry and oak trees. As he does so, I
wonder, how small a forest is too small?
This wee forest was planted just three years ago, so it's got a long way to go
before its Scots pines and hazel trees become what looks like a forest. For now,
though, butterflies and bees skit around the yellow gorse bushes and tree
saplings.
This wee Scottish forest is grown according to the Miyawaki method to grow
them. Developed by Japanese botanist and ecologist Akira Miyawaki in the
1970s, it's a way of speedily restoring native woodland on areas of degraded
land. It's a key aspect of what makes these areas "tiny forests", not just small
patches of trees.
The method involves randomly planting a mix of native species in a soil
intensively restored with organic nutrients. All layers of a forest are planted
