The Miyawaki Method | Trees Outside Woodland

Summary

In Kent, a unique project utilizes the Miyawaki tree planting method to transform urban green spaces. This method, unlike traditional tree planting, involves preparing the soil to enhance its quality and plant trees densely to foster quicker growth and biodiversity. By incorporating a variety of native species, the Miyawaki method aims to replicate natural woodlands while creating mini nature reserves that serve as wildlife havens and offer numerous environmental benefits, like carbon absorption and noise buffering. This approach also provides a model for effective tree planting in challenging urban areas, promising resilience, cost-efficiency, and community involvement in enhancing urban biodiversity.

Highlights

• Miyawaki forests grow quickly due to dense planting strategies! 🚀
• Nutrient-rich soil preparation is crucial for tree health! 🌿
• Over 40 different species are used to mimic natural woodlands. 🌲
• These mini-forests enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services. 🐝
• Urban Miyawaki plots are resilient against vandalism! 🛡️

Key Takeaways

• The Miyawaki method creates dense, biodiverse mini-forests quickly! 🌳
• Dense planting leads to faster tree growth and better survival rates. 🌱
• Biodiversity is promoted by using various native plant species. 🐞
• Urban areas benefit from Miyawaki forests through ecosystem services! 🌍
• These forests provide resilience against climate change and urbanization. 🌦️

Overview

Imagine a world where urban landscapes transform into thriving mini-forests almost overnight! That's precisely what the Miyawaki method achieves in Kent. By densely planting a variety of tree species and preparing the soil with care, developers have crafted a biodiverse haven that not only grows rapidly but also supports the local ecosystem and absorbs carbon, combats noise pollution, and shelters wildlife in the heart of the city.

The ingenuity of this method lies in its simplicity and effectiveness. By aerating soil and mixing in beneficial fungi, then planting up to five trees per square meter, the Miyawaki method ensures robust growth and resilience against urban challenges. As trees grow in unison, they create lush green havens that are not only resistant to negative human impact but are also beautiful.

This exciting method heralds a new era for urban ecological projects. As the Miyawaki plots consistently show higher biodiversity and survival rates than traditional planting methods, they offer a compelling case for cities worldwide to adopt this transformative approach. This success story in Kent might well inspire other communities to turn urban areas into green oases for the future.

The Miyawaki Method | Trees Outside Woodland Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] thank you
• 00:30 - 01:00 we're here in Kent today to have a look at one of the number of projects we've been testing in urban settings to see how trees can be planted compared to how we've done it in the past this trial plot here in Kent is looking at trying a Milwaukee style of planting next to a controlled version it's nice that we've had the opportunity to plant them directly side by side so you can really see the differences how it has turned out [Music]
• 01:00 - 01:30 so this is our miyawaki trial plot this is our kind of showcase one for the project this one was planted in February 2021 so it's now in its third summer of growth we're at Parkwood Recreation ground which is owned by Maitland Borough Council it's an urban Green Space I'm surrounded by a house in the state and then behind us we have an ancient Woodland so this area used to completely
• 01:30 - 02:00 be covered by Woodland historically it was cleared after the second world war to build the house in the state and this land was actually the Builder's yard during the construction of the houses which meant that the soil here was really poor quality because it had a lot of Builders sand and a lot of waste material mixed into it so when we would plant in the trees there was no worms here at all it was really degraded soil really compacted from all the heavy machinery
• 02:00 - 02:30 that been going over it for our trial we have our experimental side which is the miyawaki style of planting and then we have this control side which is just traditional planting and then we have a free meter Gap separating the two so the concept of a Mia wacky planting is to sort of more instantly create what would be a woodland that might naturally appear after over decades and Decades of growth with its different extra layers of different kinds of
• 02:30 - 03:00 heights of trees and things and understory plants but the concept is to just basically put them all in at the start and give them more of a kind of natural woodlandy style setting based on what would have what we think would have been here originally and what we're looking at is this amazing difference between these two halves we're looking at the miyawaki project the mini Forest on the behind me and then the control that's happened next to it and what's happened is we've just got good good ground preparation it's been
• 03:00 - 03:30 planted properly it's been planted well and the difference is astonishing and what we're after is is learning from this this is an experiment this is trying to do things a bit differently from the way we've always done it and using different ideas and thought processes to come up with better ways of planting trees when akiramirwaki conceived his revolutionary new approach to Woodland establishment
• 03:30 - 04:00 it had resilience that it's very high in terms of protecting communities and protecting the landscape and as we move into an Ever more uncertain future with climate change and all the challenges around growth and new diseases new pests and pathogens entering the country has never been more important the Milwaukee methods involves firstly making sure the soil is really healthy
• 04:00 - 04:30 so you want to aerate it we used a mini Digger to dig out the soil to about one meter deep and then just turned it over and dumped it back on as a little Mound on site then we added mycorrhizal fungi and lots of other biological materials to improve the nutrient content of the soil we then planted the trees really densely so this side is three to five trees per square meter whereas the control plot is
• 04:30 - 05:00 only one tree per square meter and the density increases the competition between the trees which makes them grow a lot faster we also use a really wide variety of species so there's about 40 different tree and shrub species in here and that's the aim is to replicate what you would find in natural Woodland and we've also got different species for the different canopy levels of the woodlands so like the ground shrubby species the medium tree species and the taller ones as well
• 05:00 - 05:30 so in this experiment we've also done something different where we've packed in a whole range of different species into a very small area to try and provide species that grow well together provide species that work to encourage the others up and in that we've created opportunities for biodiversity to opening up the opportunities for lots and lots of insects and the really exciting thing will be to follow that over the next few years to see whether the density of species actually impacts the biodiversity and if it does then
• 05:30 - 06:00 that's fabulous because we're creating these little mini nature reserves all across the country which will be fabulous for wildlife we use the concept of potential natural vegetation which is where you identify the species that would be in an area if it wasn't for human activity so that is why you want to use as many different Native species as possible here in Kent obviously the landscape used to be much more diverse than it is
• 06:00 - 06:30 today and we've tried to replicate that historic landscape in our tree plot here so we've included some more rarer species such as small Leaf lime purging butt form and box as well and these slightly more unusual ones are really really good for wildlife because they're not that common in our landscape anymore we're trying to create opportunities for trees to grow in other places and on this playing field in the past there has been real problems of vandalism and other things that have stopped the trees
• 06:30 - 07:00 from establishing but in the Milwaukee that hasn't happened because it's a bit denser so we have so many more trees surviving and that means that you've got a greater chance that the trees will grow we found that the trees in the control of vandalism last year we as well as damage into the fencing but the trees in the miyawaki plot have been absolutely fine and we think that's because of the density of the planting and the height of the trees which is
• 07:00 - 07:30 another reason the technique is so successful in addition to the threatened risk to our woodlands and the problems that we have with establishing new Woodland we've such as increased frequency of severe weather the periods of drought the high winds the flood and all of the other issues and all of the pests and pathogens and new diseases we Face there's also a big challenge in parts of the UK from significant population growth and from development and for our
• 07:30 - 08:00 pilot trials for the Milwaukee plots we deliberately chose some of the tougher neighborhoods in in areas where we've had problems establishing trees in the past that I think has been really really important lesson we've learned because we've seen control plots which are easy to get amongst the trees and shrubs they're very small they're easy to break we've seen them just snapped off in in Mindless vandalism but the Milwaukee plots because they established so quickly within a year they become an impenetrable Thicket so therefore it's
• 08:00 - 08:30 very difficult to do any damage to them the benefits of using the Milwaukee method in urban areas is that the fast growth rates of the trees increase the ecosystem Services provided to local residents so that includes absorbing carbon absorbing air pollution buffering noise pollution absorbing rainfall and obviously all the benefits it provides to Wildlife as well it also gives local people an opportunity to connect with nature
• 08:30 - 09:00 and it's really striking the difference that we've seen um how how much the trees have come on how much they've grown how much they've supported biodiversity and the community actually in this Urban setting here in Kent so it's nice to at least think that we've hopefully got some tools in the Armory to establish trees in the next decades ahead if we get five or six trees out of this to become mature specimen trees that
• 09:00 - 09:30 would be perfect because we're not actually trying to create little tiny Woods we're just trying to give the trees the best chance to establish and in that we get the chance for new tree creation across all sorts of areas of the country we've just worked out nastily that there's 12 percent of the country is covered in Woodlands but nearly three percent of the country is covered in small groups of trees and we didn't know that until very recently so we want more
• 09:30 - 10:00 of this there's so many more opportunities to get more trees into the countryside not as big Woodlands but as small groups and we need the right techniques to do it to achieve that effect as we get a warming or heating climate as we get far more International Trade we're seeing all sorts of novel and bacteria and fungi and so on you that we have things like ash dieback which has had a significant impact in Ken and that is one of the challenges
• 10:00 - 10:30 when you've got a tree which is is dominant we've lost that complexity that we once had the ancient Wildwood was not single species stands it was a whole mixture of tree species and that's what the Milwaukee method seeks to recreate and recreate files and we've been measuring the survival of the trees which species are faring better than others The Establishment rates the growth rates
• 10:30 - 11:00 The Wider biodiversity so all the kind of other plants and animals that have been turning up in the plot and we're also going to be measuring the carbon and nitrogen content of the soil before and after the experiments ended and through the trees establishing the trees becoming more resilient to all everything that nature and a man is throwing at it means that it supports Wildlife as well and within our miyawaki plots in Kent we've seen some real Rarities we've also
• 11:00 - 11:30 seen some really interesting fungi things like hairs for ink cap and that in Kent that's a real ancient Woodland indicator fungi and it's turned up on these you know former building site Sandy compacted Recreation grounds because the soil has been properly prepared from our surveys we've realized that the experimental Port has recorded twice the amount of biodiversity than the control plot so it
• 11:30 - 12:00 has twice the amount of additional animal and plant species in it than the control it's also had a 99 survival rate whereas this has a 75 survival rate and that included during the really bad drought we had last summer the Milwaukee plot is able to hold on to its leaves much later in the Autumn compared to the trees in the control plot our analysis has shown that the cost of establishing trees in the miyawaki plot is 30 cheaper than it is
• 12:00 - 12:30 in the control port and that is because it has a much higher survival rate another great thing about this trial plot as well is that it's got given other local practitioners confidence in the Mia walking methodology because they can see just how well it's worked here we have six other pots in Kent and we have some in Norfolk Cornwall and Chichester who are replicating this trial in their own areas because for climate change we have to have more trees across the country we have to have more shade more opportunities for
• 12:30 - 13:00 wildlife and this is giving us a really cheap and effective way of doing it now word is getting round and we're seeing a number of miwacki schemes growing up in the the most unlikely places in in the middle of cities and I think we're now seeing severe weather impacts where Coastal communities with risk of land slips and subsidence and tidal flooding issues and so on we now need that defensive planting and I think the Milwaukee scheme it has remarkable properties and
• 13:00 - 13:30 abilities to defend the communities it shares the tree Council really brings people together for the love of trees and so it's been really nice to take part in this project with our partners at Deborah Natural England and Kent County Council and other local authorities as well I feel really proud about what we've been able to achieve with this project and for not just myself but also the local residents everyone's enjoyed seeing the two different sites develop and watching the different growth rates
• 13:30 - 14:00 it's really nice to be able to share this work with you here at the Urban Tree Festival hopefully some of you'll be able to pop down and have a look and really see for yourself the difference that the Milwaukee method has has made here [Music] [Music]