It’s a Saturday morning in April, and several hundred people have gathered near the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, a two-mile spit of land just east of Manhattan. Roosevelt Island is the perfect place to be part of the city but also mercifully separate from it. Day trekkers can wander a park honoring Franklin D. Roosevelt or snack on caviar nachos at the swanky Graduate Hotel. They can explore outside the smallpox hospital, a crumbling, ivy-twined reminder of when the island was known for its prisons and sanitariums rather than its views of the East River and the United Nations.
And now, people can also visit a forest—a “pocket forest,” to be more precise.
It’s a blip of land, barely bigger than a single tennis court, but still large enough to contain almost 1,500 plants representing 47 native species: oaks, hemlocks, beach plums, and shagbark hickories, to name a few. This is the first such forest in New York City, and the 200th from SUGi, a global forest-building organization headquartered in London. (Antarctica is the only continent without a SUGi footprint.) Founded in 2019 and named after a Japanese cedar of the same name, SUGi is dedicated to “greening cities and reimagining urban life” by planting miniature forests that improve biodiversity, build community, and foster climate resilience.
That’s the vision SUGi founder and CEO Elise Van Middelem lays out to us on this spring morning, the Manhattan skyline visible behind her. She is joined by several other speakers, among them Christina Delfico, founder of iDig2Learn, a central partner on the project, which connects children and families to nature. The speakers welcome us to the island and prepare us for the work ahead. We’ll be planting on a plot of land in Southpoint Park, a spot selected for its proximity to the East River (the forest will help to prevent rainwater runoff) and its accessibility to the public.
Visitors won’t have much to do at the forest when it matures, other than take in its rowdy beauty and track its growth over the coming years. Still, pocket forests are singular urban spaces very much worth visiting. They are designed to be thick, unruly, and unmanicured. They’re often made in forgotten places and feature native plant species that once flourished in their respective locations before development. While they’re usually too dense to enter (enterprising toddlers notwithstanding), they provide much-needed oases for tranquility and reflection. This is “urban acupuncture,” as Van Middelem puts it in her speech, a “healing forest” that can improve the quality of life not just for the land, but for people who stroll or lounge nearby.
“Most of our greatest cities are built on ancient forests,” Van Middelem tells the crowd. “It’s SUGi’s mission to bring them back in partnership with communities.”
The word reforestation may conjure images of large open spaces dotted with eager young saplings. But reforestation can happen in all kinds of places, particularly when the process employs the growth strategies that make pocket forests unique. Conventional landscaping wisdom dictates that trees should be given ample room to grow. In pocket forests, however, the trees are packed tightly together, usually no more than a foot or two apart. Pocket forests are also unique for the huge variety of plant species they feature. The idea is to create urban spaces that mimic the old-growth forests that were cut down to build cities around the world, including here, in what is now New York City.
The roots of the pocket forest go back to the 1970s, when Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki began planting small forests that replicated the vitality of the plant life he observed around shrines throughout Japan. Miyawaki would go on to create similar projects in 1,300 locations, each proof of “the healing power of forests” (as one of Miyawaki’s books is titled), enriching both the area and the residents. Miyawaki created pocket forests across Southeast Asia and beyond, all unique to their environment, all unified by two key values: density and diversity.
Because the trees and bushes in a pocket forest are planted in such proximity, the competition for resources—light, soil nutrients—is intense. The resultant jockeying makes plants grow up to 10 times faster than in more spacious settings. According to Ethan Bryson, head forester on the Roosevelt Island project, plants in pocket forests (also known as Miyawaki forests) have a survival rate of about 90 percent, far higher than in more conventional reforestation projects.
In 2011, pocket forests got an important boost when industrial engineer Shubhendu Sharma launched his forest company in India. Sharma wanted to make forests “with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business,” as he put it in a 2014 Ted Talk. The results are inarguable: As of 2019, Sharma’s company, Afforestt, has planted 144 forests and more than 450,000 trees. Perhaps more significant, Sharma has inspired would-be forest makers everywhere—Bryson among them.
After watching Sharma’s Ted Talk, in 2016 Bryson created a company of his own, Natural Urban Forests, building forests in all kinds of unexpected places. There are pocket forests on former landfills, around factories, and next to corrections facilities. The goal is always the same: to “bring back forests with the same ambition that they were cut down,” he says.
The roots of the pocket forest go back to the 1970s. Community members are integral to their development.
Photos by Dino Kuznik; courtesy SUGi
Pocket forests aren’t limited to marginal spaces. Major cities—such as Tokyo, Scotland’s Glasgow, and South Africa’s Cape Town—have pocket forests, some in central, high-profile locations. In London, SUGi-affiliated pocket forests can be found among the boxy, brutalist buildings of the South Bank, next to St. Luke’s Church in Earl’s Court, and near a pair of hospitals in Chelsea. In Beirut, pocket forests bring greenery to neighborhoods devastated by the 2020 port explosion. In Mumbai, India, a pocket forest offers tranquility outside a hospital. Wandering through the city or hurrying on their way to work, locals and visitors can enjoy a quick infusion of greenery, listen to birds, and consider their relationship with the earth.
Are these pocket forests destinations, in the way the Eiffel Tower and Westminster Abbey and the Great Wall of China are destinations? Not quite. But a pocket forest is still an attraction, in the sense that it makes its broader environment more attractive, more livable—more surprising—thus contributing to an area’s overall appeal. We may come to cities with a clear sense of what we want to see and do: this statue, that café. But travel is about more than visiting a list of high-profile monuments. It’s about the region surrounding the monuments. It’s about the sights and smells we encounter en route to the “top 10” restaurants. Visitors to the Kumano Shrine in Tokyo, for example, or the Franconia Sculpture Park outside Minneapolis, likely aren’t thinking about pocket forests when they arrive. But both locations have pocket forests that will enrich the experience of those who manage to see them.
Of course, pocket forests also flourish near schools, in parks, around housing complexes, and among other everyday areas. These are not places that most people visit with any particular attentiveness. Part of the “work” of a pocket forest, then, is to enliven the mundane spaces in our lives; to make us visitors in our own neighborhoods and cities; to help us see these areas as particular and thus worthy of attention. Why shouldn’t the places where we spend most of our lives be such oases of beauty? Why shouldn’t we get a lift of pleasure, of refreshment, on our way to the grocery store? Because pocket forests are so packed with plants, they are often difficult, if not impossible, to walk through. But people can still amble their perimeters, or, in certain cases, stroll along designated pathways between pockets of density. (The Roosevelt Island location will have some wheelchair access via pathways near the forest.)
The environmental benefits of pocket forests, too, are impressive. Urban trees store more than 700 million tons of carbon, or “approximately 12.6 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions in the United States,” according to the Climate Change Resource Center. City plants absorb rainwater, clean the air, and help improve the health of the soil. They give shelter to birds, bugs, and other creatures that contribute to local biodiversity, not just in the forests themselves, but in surrounding areas. Bryson predicts that the Roosevelt Island pocket forest will attract peregrine falcons, squirrels, and butterflies. Below ground, an invisible fungal network will improve the health and stability of the soil.
The presence of urban trees has also been associated with lower crime rates, stronger social cohesion, better immune systems, and improved mental cognition. Yale Climate Connections reports on a study that found that “doubling urban tree coverage in European cities from 15 to 30 percent could have saved more than 2,600 lives during the continent’s extreme heat wave of 2015, reducing the death toll by nearly 40 percent.” As the climate grows hotter, the cooling effects of tree shade will continue to grow more important. A mini forest, small but mighty, can help.
When the welcome speeches are over, the crowd migrates to the edge of the planting site, where piles of baby bushes, trees, and ferns are all waiting to be planted. Right now, the trees look less like trees than leafless sticks with hairy root tufts. In the months to come, however, they will begin to display their extraordinary diversity. The plant list has been created in careful collaboration with representatives from the Lenape Center, a New York–based Indigenous organization, and a central partner for the forest project. When the forest is mature, it will model, in miniature, a version of the same woodland areas known to the Lenape people who once lived here.
Curtis Zunigha, codirector and cofounder of the Lenape Center, is the first to plant a tree. He lights a bundle of tobacco, the sweet, smoky scent quickly filling the air. He puts some of the tobacco in the ground, consecrating the area and summoning goodwill for the future forest. To Zunigha, this project isn’t just a lovely injection of greenery or a buffer against flooding and erosion. It is also a sanctuary that provides “healing and wellness,” as he puts it, a place that can counteract the “historical and generational trauma [inflicted] on the Lenape people,” whom European settlers attacked and pushed from their land centuries earlier.
One by one, the tree clippings are dunked in a bucket of brownish “compost tea” made from liquid runoff that seeps from compost scraps; the solution is rich with nutrients that will help the trees grow well and quickly. Volunteers carry the tree clippings onto the site of the future forest, navigating soil that has been pockmarked with holes for each of the trees, shrubs, and ferns. Then the trees are planted, one to a hole—and then the process starts all over again.
Soon it’s my turn to plant a tree. A woman hands me a short sapling she identifies as a baby maple. I dunk the roots in the compost tea, waiting for the bubbles to shake free. I then proceed onto the soil, walking up to a man who directs me to a designated hole. The earth is cold, damp, and mixed with wood chips that have been donated by Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. I place my tree in the hole, refill it with dirt, and pat everything into place.
The area next to the new forest is scattered with gardening equipment: shovels, rakes, buckets, spades. But the broader context is unmistakably urban. A Fresh Direct grocery truck rumbles by. A woman feeds her dog out of a plastic takeout container. Across the water, a huge Pepsi-Cola sign is visible in Brooklyn. The disjoint of it all—between natural and unnatural, between artificial and alive—is striking.
I wash my hands and start chatting with the volunteers. One woman has lived on Roosevelt Island for decades. Another runs an environmentally oriented dance studio. Two little girls sell Girl Scout cookies, while two boys carry a heavy water-filled bucket. This is our forest: That, in any case, is the message of its organizers. Pocket forests aren’t simply about transforming land; they are about transforming, or at least enriching, the communities that make and enjoy them. If, as the author Richard Powers has written, forests are “intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life,” then we, too, exist in an intricate, reciprocal community, our bonds strengthened by a shared investment in this and other future pocket forests.
We New Yorkers, it turns out, are the 48th species at work in the Roosevelt Island pocket forest.
