“Our forest, like our town, is very tiny,” says Dorothy Foley of Merchantville, which is just over half a square mile. “I have to be honest, it was unbelievable how fast it grew.”
A year ago, Foley, head of Merchantville’s volunteer Green Team, helped plant a patch of land near the town’s railroad tracks with what she called a “ridiculous” number of trees and shrubs, placed to compete with each other and provide supercharged environmental benefits. They used a grant from the New Jersey Shade Tree Federation to plant the borough-owned plot, about the size of a three-car garage.
At first, town leaders hadn’t taken the Green Team’s proposal for a tiny forest seriously. “When we planted the seed of the idea, they did chuckle,” she says. “But we told them there are an estimated 3,000 tiny forests worldwide, and they’re a great way to combat climate change, with the trees sucking that carbon dioxide, providing habitat for wildlife, and providing beautiful shade. So we’re thrilled to have it in town.”
Merchantville, in Camden County, is one of about a dozen New Jersey towns with tiny forests, which were first conceived by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki in the early 1970s to beautify corporate campuses and demonstrate the generative and restorative powers of nature.
Also known as micro, Miyawaki, or pocket forests, they are small and very densely planted with native species of trees and shrubs, in soil that has been enriched with organic material. Tiny forests need fencing, weeding and watering for the first two to three years, then become self-sustaining. As the tightly-packed plants elbow each other out for sunlight, they grow unusually fast, sucking up carbon and stormwater as they go.
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Tiny forests have sprouted up in towns including Summit, Elizabeth, Rahway, Princeton, Readington and Piscataway, with others in the works in Hainesport and Bloomfield. Many have been funded by Sustainable New Jersey, New Jersey American Water, and the state Shade Tree Federation.
Sustainable Jersey, which receives funding from the PSEG Foundation, recently recognized one of the state’s early champions of tiny forests as a Sustainability Hero—Donna Goggin Patel, chair of the Summit Environmental Commission. She has championed Summit’s tiny forest, behind its community center, as a place that welcomes volunteers and recently sent Girl Scout troops out for a weed treasure hunt, giving them laminated pictures of offending crabgrass and ground ivy for them to dig up. She has also worked with the town’s Native Seed Library, housed in a repurposed card catalog, which provides native plant seeds, some harvested from the forest, to local residents.
Middle school students planted another forest serving an educational purpose, in April at Readington Middle School in Hunterdon County. It includes outdoor classroom space.
“In general, outside is relaxing,” says student Vidur Rangashyam. “Trees with a certain smell or sight can change a person’s day.”
Students in the Eco Ambassadors club helped write applications for the $70,000 in grants that funded the forest.
Universities are also tapping the educational value of tiny forests. Josh Kover, then a masters-degree student at Rutgers, organized an April planting festival at the Livingston campus in Piscataway, where 525 people gathered to help plant a tiny forest on the site of a former road.
“We only had 50 shovels, so there was a line out the door the entire day,” he says. Most attendees had never planted a tree before.
For some Kean University students, one tiny forest in Elizabeth is a living laboratory. At a recent visit to Groundwork Elizabeth’s five-year-old forest behind the Elmora Library, environmental science professor Daniela Shebitz was overseeing students and participants in the community-engagement program as they used a clinometer to measure the height of trees. She also showed them how to take core samples of the soil. Shebitz pointed out a hackberry that had grown seven times faster than its counterparts in less crowded conditions.
“What makes me so excited about this is the community aspect,” says Shebitz, who has welcomed people dropping by. “It’s about getting people outside, and knowing you don’t have to go far to connect with nature.”
She and other academics want to see more data on the effects of tiny forests. Jason Grabosky, a professor in the Rutgers Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources program, fields questions about microforests in his work as an extension specialist for the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. He is concerned that some tiny forest fans may exaggerate their power to reduce urban heat islands, for example.
“We have to be careful about what our promises are and set reasonable expectations,” he says, adding that a tenth-of-an acre forest may have negligible cooling results over an entire city. “I’m deemed the grumpy pessimist.”
At the end of 50 years, only one large tree may remain in a tiny forest, having outcompeted all the others, Grabosky points out.“It could be one tree with a very vibrant plant community beneath it, and more importantly, a vibrant human community that’s engaged,” he says. He calls tiny forests “a really potent tool” for rallying communities to take rewarding actions to help nature.
Back in Merchantville, Dorothy Foley and her team have made sure the borough leaders see their tiny forest flourish.
“The people who were skeptical inspired us to make sure it’s successful,” she says. Since the first forest has done so well, she says, they have plans now to plant a second one.
