Imagine a patch of grass transformed into a dense, thriving forest in just 3 years. That’s the promise of what Jake M. Robinson calls the 'Miyawaki forest revolution.' Is it the ecological game-changer we need, or just another distraction? Let’s find out.
NOTE: The text below has more than the podcast actually says.
I think at first we should start with a thank you to Fife Council’s Grasslands Project. Link: https://www.fife.gov.uk/kb/docs/articles/environment2/climate-change,-carbon-and-energy/what-fife-council-is-doing/rewilding-fife The Fife Grasslands Project, launched in response to the 2019 Declaration of Climate Emergency, aimed to cut grass less and harvest it for sustainable uses. Since 2022, Muiredge Park has hosted overlapping initiatives. We’re grateful to Fife Council for making this possible. I think the Council could expand the Grasslands into fully fledged Nature Restoration Zones, after all, it will save money if they just leave it alone completely. The grass is just going to strangle itself for the next 10 years if nobody cuts it - it won’t turn into a forest by itself for years and years - why? Because of the deer, of course.
Muiredge Park, since 2022, is where the Grasslands project gave way to something even more special: one of Akira Miyawaki’s Tiny Forests. Akira Miyawaki was a Japanese botanist, who died in 2021 at the ripe old age of 93. He worked on a question very close to our question about baselines: “what would a pre-human plant ecology look like?” OK, he’s max-ing out the forest a bit more than the rewilders would like; he was intent on maximising the flourishing of forest cover, he’s a botanist so what do you expect? But his passion for plants and his popularity goes to show that rewilding isn’t the only nature restoration show in town. There’s more than one way to attempt ecosystem restoration and let’s admit it: the Japanese have looked after their natural heritage so much better than the Scots.
A Tiny Forest is about the size of a tennis court. It has 600 closely planted trees. A JCB has dug up the soil and made sure there is 80cm of crumbly, fertile earth; enriched with woodchips and nutrients. The trees get the best soil and so even when they are planted so close together the trees cooperate, rather than compete. The trees eventually chat exchanging micronutrients and supporting each other across fungal networks. A Tiny Forest is a nurtured, native forest planted in optimal prepared soil to produce a layered canopy forest in the shortest period of time.
We made a short YouTube movie in 2022 about the Wee Forest. As you watch, you’ll perhaps start to wonder if there isn’t a problem with the Wee Forest as a concept. Maybe getting a massive JCB to totally churn the place up is an ironic way to act in a ‘climate emergency’ - and it is pretty ironic, let’s face it. Some of us here at Willow Worlds wonder how much of that soil preparation is really that necessary, is there a cheaper way? Coming from a Fifer - the most tight-fisted of the Scots - you might have expected this question! But seriously though, even though I can’t help it… can we do it cheaper?
Enjoy:
In appearance, we might mistake a Wee Forest for a copse. A copse is an old word for a small group of trees and most people know that. Across Fife, you can sometimes see farm fields which have a copse in the middle. Their story is that they are places known or suspected to be burial mounds from the days of the Black Death or some other plague. Sometimes they are called: Plague Woods, and Lower Largo, Culross Moor and Devilla Forest all have examples, and in these plague woods the trees stand as guardians of the potentially hazardous diseases lurking in the soil
.Let’s turn to the national context of Tiny Forests across Europe. Upcoming star of tree science Jake M. Robinson in his new book Treewilding (2024) exclaims that “There’s a Miyawaki forest revolution taking place. Only time will tell if it will be a game-changer or a distraction from better solutions.”And that was just 6 months ago, which is the blink of an eye to a tree.
Before his death in 2021, Miyawaki had supervised the creation of over 1300 tiny forests. But in the UK, all Miyawaki Forests are new. The oldest one in the UK is just 4 years old, planted as it was in Oxford in 2020 - just 2 years before our one. Looking at photos from the Earthwatch Europe website, reproduced here, we can see that the Oxford one has grown amazingly well from a good year of growth in 2021 to what looks like full forest in 2023, just 3 years from its first planting. It really does work.
Since then 256 tiny forests have been created across the UK. Only 30 of them have been created in Scotland, which when you think about the space we have for planting trees, might seem like a scandal. In 2019, Scotland declared a Climate Emergency and the best new idea in tree planting, in a country with vast tree plantations, only managed to find 30 sites in 4 years. In Scotland, we’re supposed to call them ‘Wee Forests’ but if they are Wee Forests they are Rare Wee Forests. In Holland, a charity called IVN Nature Education has helped cities create over 200 Tiny Forests. Glasgow has only 10 and Edinburgh has only 4 but we get to make it sound like it’s a Scottish invention by changing its name to Wee Forest. It’s a national embarrassment when you look at it like that. But before we glue ourselves to the doors of our nearest public building in protest or something, maybe we should look for a rational reason why as a country we’ve really not gone for the Miyawaki method yet.
There must be something hampering progress. I want to know why Holland and England rolled out their Tiny Forests in their hundreds while we fell far short of our rather unambitious target of 50. I suppose that the majority of the Scottish countryside was deemed unsuitable for Wee Forest projects because of the threat posed by the deer. What’s the point of a Wee Forest, if deer can just jump in and eat it? This then is perhaps the most likely reason for the clearly unambitious Wee Forest plan in Scotland.
I’m speculating but this might be why NatureScot specified that Wee Forests have to be created in urban areas of social deprivation, maybe the thinking was that housing affords protection to the Wee Forest against the worst effects of the deer. This would also limit the number of sites meeting the criteria, hence the low number of Wee Forests in Scotland. Well, I don’t know. Interestingly, the Wee Forest at Muiredge Park seems to have suffered little so far from deer, and I’m not sure why that is. Could the small size of the enclosure and the low wire fence be affording protection?
Anyway, I still blame the deer for the fact that the Miyawaki revolution hasn’t really happened in Scotland. I could be wrong: a temporary deer fence where it was needed wouldn’t have been a big ask in a climate emergency. There is still time left, if you’re reading this in 2025 and you’re not in terrible distress. There are still 5 years left of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration so maybe Scotland can catch up. For what it’s worth I think there should be a Miyawaki Forest revolution in Scotland. Please help to make a Wee Forest, please search the internet for “Wee Forest” and follow the links to the NatureScot website, make an application and get it done. It’s easy, if you are doggedly persistant.
Tree planting is often held up as a gold standard of sustainable activities. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can think of as an environmental action apart from a litter picking, doing the recycling and going vegan. And it’s very sustainable, I mean it can’t really take over your life, it’s just a few wintery planting days a year and that’s it - you’ve done your bit to save the world, you can book your next flight with a clear conscience.
The best time to plant a tree was 80 years ago - I mean, it’s only when the tree is mature that it really starts to pack away the carbon from the atmosphere. The logic of planting a tree as a carbon offset really is a sort of time-travel experiment - your Boeing 747 flight might be offset with a donation to a tree plantation - but the flight needs that parcel of land for the next century to offset the flight. Maybe I’m missing something but I’m sure you can see my point - trees don’t grow fast enough to offset Boeing 747s - come on trees, grow faster!
Still and nevertheless, planting a tree this month is an exercise in hope. It’s defo better than not planting a tree - there is actually a debate for another time on this but, to cut a long story short, I still think it is defo better than not planting a tree. Anyway, I can’t think of many other environmental actions to do so I spend some of my time planting trees.
The conventional way to plant a tree is to make a couple of slits into the ground in a T-shape with a spade. Then you lever up the top slit of the T-shape, see the soil part like a mouth and drop the tree sapling into it. Press the soil down gently with your foot and then hammer in a wooden stake to hold the tree guard. Then protect the tree with a tree guard and, if you are extra serious you’ll put a mulch mat down around the tree to stop the grass from overwhelming the tree. Simple.
CLEAR have made several conventional plantations of native trees in Muiredge Park and most of them have fared poorly. It’s nobody’s fault - grass is very aggressive, the deer seem hungry, the soil is very clay-like and the last few years have had some very hot dry summers. The only area which seems to have done OK is where there is a slight dip in the ground which has afforded slightly better hydration. The contrast between these conventionally planted trees struggling against the clay and the luxurious growth in the Wee Forest is plain to see. It’s chalk and cheese, it’s all about the soil.
So that covers the native tree planting that’s already on site, I’m going to continue describing what’s there with a summary of the soil preparation activities we did on the Willow Worlds site in December. I’m going to name names because it really does take a community to do a community research project and I’d like to express my thanks to them.
Firstly, there was me and Kit (Chris Cuppitt) marking out the circles as best we could and then in December we removed and replanted trees which were getting in the way. They were all small, don’t worry. Then there was Kara Dunn-Wilkie with the CAT scanner: we insisted on very careful CAT scanning for underground pipes and cables. Then we had to remark our three circles as they weren’t circular enough. Then there was the cardboard for mulching one of the circles and, that was a lot of cardboard. Then there were deliveries of manure for 2 of the 3 circles. Donald Laing the farmer from Coalton of Wemyss did us pround with great mountains of it, 10 tonnes in both circles. Pupils were involved in this and even got a ride in the huge tractor.
Then there was the great day of ditch digging, Robert Kirkhope from CLEAR brought a small mechanical digger - nothing like the one that made the Wee Forest - and we made 3 circular ditches and filled them with grass, cardboard, manure and soil to feed the willow and enable easy planting. Sam Green and Lee Inglis put in a good shift as volunteers. Local pupils - Armani Drummond, Jackson Currie and Craig Vause were there before I was and we all worked until it was done. I’m amazed with what we did in one epic Saturday.
That’s why I need to do all this fancy writing to make reporting viable and readable: one dull paragraph and a few photos can summarize the all important physical work. Yet writing isn’t exactly useless, because it can impart meaning, context and make sense of a project. In the climate emergency, environmental writing is of little importance compared to environmental action. “The writing,” as someone like Paulo Friere once said: “is what you do, after the work.”
Oh, but anyway - if you’re free a week on Saturday you can come and actually plant a tree with us:
Event: Creative Willow Planting
Date: Saturday, January 25th, 2025
Time: 12.30-3pm
Cost: Free - but let me know to expect you!
Tickets {shrugs}: if you want a ticket…
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/batswood/1531047
Email: batswood@icloud.com
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