The Pocket Forests Grow Thick

Beside the manicured lawn at Cragmont Elementary, a Berkeley Hills school overlooking the San Francisco Bay, is a small hillside patch of tangled trees and weeds—coyote brush, sage brush, wood rose, and California blackberries—that looks a bit like a shaggy patch left unshaven. It’s a place where kids are not encouraged to go on their own. Branches that have been left to grow however they please stick out through gaps in plastic fence-netting. It’s a black hole, where a ball might disappear until a teacher is able to fight off thorns and fumble through bushes. 

But inside this “pocket forest,” life can be found growing and flying: Anna’s hummingbirds, chickadees, towhees, butterflies, moths, and leaf-cutting bees were noted, in a 2023 survey ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://www.sugiproject.com/forests/berkeley-school-forests-cragmont-elementary). And three years ago, this was just grass.

School districts across the country are tearing up the asphalt that has dominated schoolyards since the 1940s—a surface that, especially as the climate warms, increasingly reaches unbearable temperatures ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://baynature.org/article/oaklands-urban-tree-dreams-get-partially-funded/). Schoolyards need more trees and plants to cool down. At the same time, the job description for a schoolyard has expanded, according to Grey Kolevzon, co-director of Growing Together ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://www.growingtogetherprojects.org/), a nonprofit that helps school districts in the East Bay green up and provide outdoor education. School yards are not only places to play, but to give “every student a place to be connected to the living world—like in their own school campus, and an opportunity to steward the living world, and to have that deeply impact their being.”

“For children living in urban areas whose parents don’t have a lot of time to take them to Yosemite and things like that, that’s where it happens,” Kolevzon says. “In their school garden, or in their schoolyard forest, or in their schoolyard orchard.”

But as so often is the case for public schools, “budget is one of the biggest barriers,” says Sailaja Suresh, who runs the Oakland School District’s green schoolyards program. Especially money for maintenance. East Bay public schools are often so underfunded that they rely on nonprofits like Growing Together and the Trust for Public Land to help. There’s federal funding to help schools green up, but often it’s for planning and implementation, and doesn’t include maintenance, says Annie Youngerman of TPL, a San Francisco-based nonprofit with a national green schoolyards program ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://www.tpl.org/our-mission/schoolyards). 

How Cragmont’s tiny forest has grown since its 2021 establishment. What it looked like on a recent visit (top); just planted (bottom left); the original site (bottom right); and closeups of native plants. (All photos courtesy of SUGi except 2024 visit, which is by Jillian Magtoto)

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At Malcolm X Elementary, the Miyawaki forest was mostly left to fend for itself. It seems to have done so, according to Rivka Mason, the garden teacher. “After two years, we didn’t have to weed or water the forest anymore,” Mason says. The mulch and woodchips are spread over a larger and flatter area than at Cragmont, yielding a cool, welcoming pathway under the canopy. One could imagine a class of students settling in here.

In the 1980s, ecologist Akira Miyawaki spent a decade researching forest composition in Japan. Though his country’s evergreen forests were abundantly green, Miyawaki observed that only 0.06 percent of the forest contained species native to the area. Instead, fast-growing non-natives that had been planted for timber over the centuries had dominated the landscape, accelerated by World War II efforts. The Japanese government paid little attention to the environmental consequences of reforestation during and after the strained wartime period. But non-native cedar plantations created thick and visible fogs of pollen that led to intense hay fever reactions for millions of Japanese people in the 1990s, and were eventually found to support less species diversity than natural forests.

Miyawaki began formulating a method to restore native, multilayered plant communities in soils degraded by human use. It became known as the Miyawaki method—in which native trees and shrubs are seeded so closely that many are unlikely to survive. The idea was to mimic natural seeding, the competition between plants for light and water; in theory, it would lead to a more resilient ecosystem that wouldn’t need humans after a few years. Native trees with deep roots and planted alongside different species would, so the theory went, more quickly mature into a forest lasting for centuries. 

Malcolm X Elementary: two years in (in 2023), just planted (in 2021), and before planting. (Courtesy of SUGi)

The idea spread around the world. Proponents claimed Miyawaki forests could sequester more carbon and grow ten times faster than other conventional afforestation projects. Thousands of Miyawaki forests were planted, in every continent besides Antarctica. One Dutch citizen science initiative from Wageningen University showed that Miyawaki forests attracted more species groups and 50% more individuals than the reference forest after one year. Bees and pollinators turned up in astounding numbers. The soil was teeming with fungi. Beetles and spiders were thriving on the warmer exposed soil of the small forest’s path.

But as the Miyawaki method has been adapted over time, by both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, the forests have also faced criticism. For instance, environmental groups slammed multinational corporation Mitsubishi’s Miyawaki forest plantings as vastly insufficient compensation for the company’s destruction of Malaysian forests. And some arboriculturists are skeptical of claims about the forests’ ecological benefits ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://easytreesie.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/heuch-and-thurman-2024-reflections-on-the-miyawaki-tree-planting-method.-arb-magazine.pdf), questioning whether trees actually grow faster in such dense plantings. In India, where Miyawaki forests took off, two urban garden entrepreneurs were inspired to try them at a larger scale. But they sobered up when they calculated the jaw-dropping amount of resources that such a planting would require. Moreover, the method “ignores the idea that species are adapted to very specific site conditions,” they wrote in an article about their investigations ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://science.thewire.in/environment/how-mr-miyawaki-broke-my-heart/). Miyawaki’s method couldn’t just recreate native landscapes everywhere, they concluded.  

The schoolyard forests here weren’t planted only for their ecological benefits, though; they’re meant to teach and inspire students. A few years back, Neelam Patil, who was teaching science literacy at Cragmont Elementary in Berkeley, was looking for ways to help her students participate in climate action themselves. A friend sent her a tweet about a World Economic Forum video ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://www.weforum.org/videos/these-tiny-urban-forests-could-be-a-secret-weapon-against-climate-change/) on planting Miyawaki forests in cities, and Patil saw a way for her own students to take action. [Corrected; see note]

“I always credit my students with this,” says Patil, who has since started a nonprofit called Green Pocket Forests ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://us.iahv.org/portfolio/greenpocketforests/). “They were the ones who said to me, ‘Miss Patil, we’re tired of learning about climate change and deforestation. We want to do something.’” 

Neelam Patil used these patches of forests to help kids get involved with climate action. (Courtesy of SUGi)

Patil partnered with SUGi ^(https://www.blogquicker.com/goto/https://www.sugiproject.com/forests/berkeley-school-forests-malcolm-x-elementary), a London-based nonprofit that plants Miyawaki forests in cities across the world, to fundraise and help transform patches of schoolyard lawn into Miyawaki forests. The plantings were done in 2021. Under Patil’s guidance, each student planted a tree just under a foot tall and measured its progress throughout the year. Now, over 4,000 trees live in these forests across four schools at Berkeley School Unified School District, according to SUGi. There was no instruction manual on how to care for the forest—Patil had to figure it out herself.

“It became a living laboratory where kids could take measurements, gather real-life data, and be stewards to the land,” Patil says. 

Last year, two years after the planting, SUGi took a look at each elementary school’s pocket forest, and found 53 types of native plants, ranging from over 400 to 2,600 trees. Over 90 percent of the plants had survived at Malcolm X Elementary, and 83 percent at Cragmont, according to SUGi’s surveys. Students helping with the surveys unearthed thick fungal mats and spotted evidence of bites from native leaf-cutting bees. Now, the tallest tree in Malcolm X Elementary’s Miyawaki forest stretches above the library. Birds, bees, moths, and other pollinators have found habitat and shade among the trees.

How the Malcolm X forest looks today. (Jillian Magtoto)

But there are downsides, too. At both forests, school officials said students are visiting the forest less frequently as the bushes have thickened. To get in requires pushing aside spiky stalks, finding the short dirt path that cuts through the plants.

This lone path entering the forest seems largely unexplored at Cragmont Elementary School, where students are not allowed inside the Miyawaki forest and, on a recent visit, were quick to warn those who enter that the rule applies to visitors, too. Candyce Cannon, the principal, said the school is not quite sure what to do with this patch.

“The forest desperately needs to be watered, by volunteers and parents,” Cannon says, noting some dried-out plants and weeds. “It’s a great talking piece to say, hey, we have a Miyawaki forest, but that’s about it. It’s not as central as it could have been, and I’m sad about that.” After Patil left Cragmont Elementary, the forest was left to the school’s care—without, Cannon says, clear instructions or funding. (Patil says she organized a group of volunteers in the forest’s first summer, arranged for maintenance with the groundskeeper, and has corresponded with a high-schooler who has continued weeding and trimming.) And thus far, none of the teachers seem to have taken up Patil’s mantle to introduce new cohorts of students to the forest. [Updated; see note]

Turnover at schools is often a challenge for green schoolyard projects, whether they’re pocket forests or edible gardens, in part because groundskeeping staff don’t typically maintain them; teachers and volunteers do. It’s a problem Growing Together has tried to tackle by remaining flexible, Kolevzon says, and adapting to the needs of each school.

Another challenge is that pocket forests look messy. Or, perhaps, just not like what people expect at a school. “One of our goals is to plant trees that are going to last for a long time,” said Sailaja Suresh, who oversees green schoolyard projects for the Oakland Unified School District. “One part of it is revisiting what an average school yard can look like.” 

The perimeter of the forest at Cragmont Elementary is indeed weedy and chaotic. But inside, blue elders are standing tall, white sage purple flowers tower above the height of a person, and native blackberry brambles’ thorny tendrils cover the mulched ground. The patch’s neglect is, in a way, in keeping with the notion of the Miyawaki method: an experiment in a self-sustaining forest. 

Walking the grounds at Malcolm X, revisiting the Miyawaki forest, Rivka Mason says she’s newly inspired. “Maybe it’d be fun to bring the classes out here and get them to have a sense of how big things are grown,” she muses. Just recently she spoke with a student who had planted one of the original trees here, three years ago. “She said she liked planting something, and remembered it was prickly.”