'Microforest' takes root amid city streets of Providence, reflecting worldwide trend
“This isn’t habitat restoration on the scale that is needed in terms of the world,” said Jacq Hall, director of special projects at Groundwork Rhode Island, an environmental group that works to create healthier, more resilient urban communities in Rhode Island. “But it is a really great way, especially in a city, for people to become very in close touch with biodiversity and why it’s important and why it’s also beautiful.”
In May, more than 100 people came out to plant the microforest.
“ There’s microforest momentum happening around the world right now,” said Jeff Matteis, cofounder of the Pearl Street Garden Collective, a group of artists, gardeners, and educators championing ecological land stewardship. “I think as more and more people see it, they’ll be inspired.”
The pocket forests adhere to the “Miyawaki method,” devised in the 1970s by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, which calls for planting a wide variety of local trees in large numbers and in very tight quarters, mimicking the biodiversity and competition of the natural growth that occurs in the wild.
In 2021, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate and SUGi teamed up to plant the first Miyawaki forest in the Northeast in Cambridge’s Danehy Park, a former landfill.
Massachusetts now has at least 20 microforests, according to Alexandra Ionescu, a Providence resident who is associate director of regenerative projects at Biodiversity for a Livable Climate, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that promotes ecosystem restoration to address climate change. And she expects to see many more in the region in the years ahead.
“They are popping up all over the world,” Ionescu said. “A lot of people right now are feeling the effects of climate change and they want to take meaningful action. It responds to the energy of those who want to engage in earth repair.”
These small but rapidly growing forests help clean the air and create a unifying focal point for the community, proponents said.
Matteis said the SUGi conservation organization compares the tiny forests to acupuncture points. “It’s just like one little point, but it just radiates benefits out.”
Cristiane Caro, a cofounder of the Pearl Street Garden Collective, said the goal is to create “patches of wildlife habitat, ecological hot spots, that overall create this larger web of resilience.”
Lacey Kohler, urban greening projects coordinator for Groundwork Rhode Island, said the microforests show how trees exist and grow together in the wild. They “bring the forest to people that cannot make it out to the forest,” she said.
Rhode Island is the smallest and second most densely populated state in the nation, and a 2022 study found it contains 139 square miles of asphalt, concrete, and other hard surfaces, amounting to 13 percent of its land area.
Hall said the benefits of forests and tree-lined streets are not distributed evenly in Rhode Island.
“You go to the East Side of Providence and you’re much closer to parks, you have much denser tree canopy coverage, and it’s quieter,” she said. “There’s a lot of good research to substantiate how good that is for people.”
People are not getting those benefits in places such as South Providence, Central Falls, and parts of Pawtucket, Hall said.
“Those things have been baked into the urban landscape because of policy decisions since the 1950s and before, when you think about systems like redlining and other discriminatory urban planning practices,” she said. “So we’re trying really hard to go back into those places that have been aggressively paved over and try to work in little bits of nature to bring those benefits to more people.”
Microforests can be used in conjunction with other strategies, such as planting street trees and improving stormwater management, Hall said.
Hall said microforests help combat climate change because they grow so quickly. With plants packed close together, they both collaborate and compete for resources, racing to reach the sun first. She said research shows forests grown using the Miyawaki method grow 10 times faster than a traditional landscape planting.
“Obviously the faster the plants are growing, the more carbon they’re sequestering very quickly,” Hall said. “You’re getting the benefit of cooler temperatures in cities, which helps address heat islands.”
Matteis said parts of Providence can be 10 to 15 degrees warmer compared with wealthy, leafy areas of the city on the same day.
The Pearl Street microforest is next to an abandoned house that recently caught fire, and it’s adjacent to the Avenue Concept, the nonprofit that creates colorful murals and other public art throughout the area.
Caro said the Pearl Street Garden Collective wants to run more educational programming, and now it has “a whole arboretum” where it can teach people to identify trees and other plants.
During a tour of the microforest, she and Hall pointed out an umbrella magnolia, yellow birch, elderberry, motherwort, winterberry, and persimmon. Matteis said some of the trees could grow to be more than 100 feet tall.
Hall said projects such as this received a big boost in funding from the federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a historic moment,” she said.
But now the Trump administration is rolling back or canceling many of those grants and programs, Hall said. The cuts came because many of the grants “were aimed at righting some of these historical wrongs, and a lot of them were about creating tree canopy in places that have been abandoned by public investment.”
Groundwork Rhode Island and the Pearl Street Garden Collective are now looking for other funding sources. The Pearl Street microforest was planted on Mother’s Day weekend, Caro said, and people were able to dedicate trees to their moms. Matteis said they hope to plant a microforest on Mother’s Day each year.
“One of the most important parts of the garden is the human connections in addition to the ecological connections that are created,” Matteis said. “It inspires people.”
Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at edward.fitzpatrick@globe.com. Follow him @FitzProv.