Root to Canopy: Growing the Miyawaki Method
In 2025, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate organized and hosted the inaugural Northeast Miniforest Summit, bringing together more than a dozen speakers across two virtual half-days and an in-person bus tour. Practitioners, researchers, and leaders from diverse fields gathered to explore the Miyawaki method of afforestation from root to canopy, while sharing experiences from planting, maintaining, and learning from miniforests across the region.
Through our Miyawaki Forest Program, we continue to play an active role in supporting the growth of the miniforest movement in our region — not only in square meters planted, but in relationships, stewardship, and shared learning.
Below, we invite you to explore summaries and reflection questions from Day 1 of the summit, spanning the ecological foundations of the Miyawaki Method, field experiences planting miniforests across cities, schools, farms, and riparian buffers, and practical lessons on soil preparation, stormwater, biodiversity, agroecology, education, and community engagement.
Introduction and Opening Reflection by Hartman Deetz and Beck Mordini
The summit opened with an invitation from Bio4Climate’s Executive Director, Beck Mordini, who shared a reflection by Hartman Deetz (Mashpee Wampanoag), reminding us that ecological restoration begins with relationships.
His reflection invited us to remember that humans are not separate from the living world, but part of a network of relatives—human and more-than-human—connected through symbiosis, interdependence, and the shared ground we inhabit. It grounded the summit in the understanding that restoration is ultimately about rebuilding relationships—with land, water, and the many forms of life around us.
The Miniforest as a Microcosm by Alexandra Ionescu
In her opening talk, Alexandra Ionescu, Bio4Climate’s Associate Director of Regenerative Projects, introduced the idea of the miniforest as a microcosm for learning how nature works. Within a small space, ecological processes—from plant growth and soil life to the water cycle—become visible and observable in real time. These living systems invite curiosity and place-based learning, helping people reconnect with the processes that regulate climate.
Alexandra also shared examples from Bio4Climate’s Miyawaki Forest Program, where communities across Massachusetts are transforming depaved and underused spaces into dense, biodiverse forests that restore soil, cool neighborhoods, and invite deeper relationships with the more-than-human world.
The Miyawaki Method: Past, Present, Future by Hannah Lewis
In her presentation, author Hannah Lewis traced the origins of the method developed by Japanese botanist Dr. Akira Miyawaki.
She drew a clear line between planting trees and planting an actual forest community. She emphasized the method’s goal of skipping ecological succession by planting climax species from the start—supported by soil preparation, multi-layered planting, and early canopy formation. She walked us through Dr. Akira Miyawaki’s original work and how the approach has expanded globally through hands-on experimentation and a growing network of practitioners.
In the Q&A, Hannah underscored the importance of stable, shade-tolerant climax species and shared examples of how colder climates face added pressures from non-native plants. She also noted a key distinction: Dr. Miyawaki worked largely within evergreen forest communities, which function differently from the deciduous systems we are working with in the Northeast U.S.
Hannah’s presentation left us with two questions to reflect on:
- If Dr. Miyawaki developed his method largely within evergreen systems—where shade persists year-round—how should we think about applying the method in our deciduous Northeastern forests, where light and shade shift so dramatically across the seasons? What seasonal dynamics deserve closer attention in the early years?
- As ecological roles shift across contexts, how do we determine which species are truly “climax species” for the forest community we’re emulating—and what the right ratios across canopy, sub-canopy, understory, and shrub layers should be?
Stories from the Field: Miniforests in Cities, Schools, and Farms in Northeast US
In Stories from the Field: Miniforests in Cities, Schools, and Farms in the Northeast US, four presenters shared grounded insights from transforming leftover urban spaces, schoolyards, and riparian buffers into miniforests across MA, CT, NY, and PA. Together they illuminated the nuances of site selection, density design, early establishment, and community-based monitoring.
Caseylee Bastien encouraged practitioners to look for “wastelands”—stump dumps, polluted edges, and odd gaps between roads—because “those are the spots where you have the opportunity to make big changes.” He emphasized that a miniforest is “a community, not just a plantation,” and that “the secret is in the soil,” where duff layers, fungi, and macroinvertebrates build early resilience.
Bram Gunther situated miniforests within Plan It Wild’s broader mission “to rewild the metropolitan areas of the United States.” He emphasized studying density in context and shared a collaborative density experiment with a student exploring how planting intensity influences growth and habitat function. Bram also introduced WILDr, Plan It Wild’s ecological scoring and planning framework.
Mary Ellen LeMay described installing seven micro forests at Bridgeport elementary schools through a Climate Smart grant—planting 4,688 natives and integrating a fourth-grade “student scientist” program using iTree. Teachers are now using the forests as outdoor classrooms, and by year two, shade and groundcovers have significantly reduced weeds.
Andrew Leahy shared a riparian restoration approach: fourteen dense Miyawaki plots planted along a degraded stream buffer using broadfork decompaction, six inches of leaf litter, and a low-intervention establishment strategy. Even with minimal inputs, these plots are showing remarkable vigor and outperforming adjacent conventional plantings.
The Q&A underscored that miniforest maintenance depends on reading each site’s conditions—from low-intervention resilience building to more supportive early care—and that long-term success ultimately rests on community adoption, context-aware stewardship, and designs that help people feel at home with “wildness.”
Stories from the Field left us with four questions to reflect on:
- How do we determine the right level of maintenance for each site—balancing low-intervention approaches with the support young miniforests need in challenging urban and suburban conditions?
- What shifts when we approach a miniforest as a living community—one that forms its own relationships—rather than as a planting project to be managed?
- How can we better understand and support the belowground community—duff layers, fungi, and macroinvertebrates—so that their relationships meaningfully guide how we design, plant, and care for miniforests, especially in urban and suburban soils?
- What unique opportunities arise when miniforests are planted along stream buffers, and how might the method help us rethink riparian restoration practices?
From Asphalt to Miniforest: Transforming Impervious Surfaces to Manage Stormwater Runoff and Heat
In Asphalt to Miniforest, the panel discussed how depaving and miniforests can help cities restore their hydrology, cool neighborhoods, and bring life back to paved places. Caseylee Bastien, RLA, CPSI (Landscape Architect/Ecologist, BSC Group Inc.), Leigh Meunier (Project Manager, Green & Open Somerville), and Max Rome, PhD (Director of Green Infrastructure, City of Boston) joined Alexandra Ionescu, Bio4Climate’s Associate Director of Regenerative Projects, for a conversation on what it takes to restore the water cycle in urban settings.
Max offered a clear framing:
“What we know in New England, is that basically, if we could capture the first inch of rain that runs off impervious surfaces and get that back into the ground, we would be very closely approximating and recreating the natural hydrology in this area, the way the rivers responded to storms before we built our cities, the nutrient loading into rivers before we built our cities.”
The discussion also explored political, cultural, and community realities—from simplified landscapes to joyful depaving parties—and offered a hopeful reminder that cities can transform when people learn and act together. It also invited us to step outside during a storm: to stand under a tree, watch how it slows the rainfall, and notice how nature works with water.
Asphalt to Miniforest left us with two questions to reflect on:
- When we watch stormwater run off pavement or other hard surfaces, what does it reveal about how water moves through our cities?
- When we notice a plant absorbing water during rainfall, what does it teach us about how nature captures, slows, and allows water to infiltrate into the ground?
Using the Miyawaki Method to Empower Agroecology and Food Forestry
In this talk, Coakee explored how the Miyawaki Method applies to food production, and how its core principles—dense, multi-layered planting, high diversity, and living soils—align with syntropic agroforestry as a form of ecological restoration. He discussed potential natural vegetation (PNV), the forest as a meta-organism, and Indigenous agroforestry practices, showing how these inform both food forests and afforestation.
This presentation leaves us with three questions to reflect on:
- What changes when we approach the forest as a living community rather than an inventory of species—and what practices help us learn to listen?
- What responsibilities emerge when we grow food in ways that restore soil, water, and biodiversity?
- What emerges when we study ecological succession more deeply, and what aspects of the Miyawaki Method still call for real, on-the-ground experimentation?
We hope these reflections and questions spark ideas and deepen your own thinking. The conversations from the summit highlight both the possibilities and the practical considerations of planting miniforests. We invite you to explore these insights and consider how this work might take root in your own community.
Share your thoughts with us at miniforests@bio4climate.org, or leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you as we begin shaping the 2026 summit.