An area smaller than a parking space can be transformed into an ecologically powerful, carbon-sequestering, biodiverse native mini-forest in a few short years using a dense planting technique known as the Miyawaki method. To share why and how to plant a Miyawaki forest, joining me on the podcast this week is Andrew Lampl, a sustainability consultant and educator.
Andrew’s focuses include regenerative land care, urban forestry, renewable energy, soil health and carbon capture, and he is also a practitioner of the forest creation technique known as the Miyawaki method of afforestation — the practice of establishing a forest where there wasn’t one before.
Andrew Lampl is a sustainability consultant and educator as well as the climate toolkit manager at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh. He is a practitioner of the Miyawaki method.
Photo Courtesy of Andrew Lampl
As you probably took note of already, Andrew and I have the same last name. The only difference is I spell Lamp’l with an apostrophe. We don’t know if we are related, but based on how few Lamp’ls there are, it’s likely we share a common ancestor.
When we first came into contact, Andrew had just started graduate school at Chatham University’s Falk School of Sustainability & Environment just outside of Pittsburgh. He was looking for resources on sheet mulching, and my name came up, he recalls. He reached out to me over email, and we have been corresponding ever since. Andrew became an avid listener of “The joegardener Show” podcast, and he introduced me to the concept of Miyawaki forest gardening — the subject of his master’s thesis. I was fascinated by the concept, and Andrew shared his expertise with me. I even attended Andrew’s fascinating thesis defense virtually.
For the past two years, Andrew has been the climate toolkit manager at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh. Phipps Conservatory is near and dear to my heart. I visited there for a season one episode of my PBS television series “Growing a Greener World.”
What Is the Miyawaki Method?
The Miyawaki method was developed by and named for Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki. Andrew describes him as an all-star in the botany world.
“Some of the first Miyawaki forests that he planted were for huge corporations,” such as Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi and Toyota, he says.
Dr. Miyawaki was obsessed with the idea native forests could be jump-started to grow quickly and surround urban blighted areas for sound protection, air pollution reduction and carbon sequestration.
“He was very, very successful at engaging many levels of multi-stakeholders from the CEOs of these corporations to government officials to schoolchildren,” Andrew says.
Thousands of volunteers would show up to plant hundreds of thousands of native tree saplings, he notes. “It’s truly remarkable the scale that he was playing at.’’
Andrew didn’t discover the Miyawaki method until 2020, but it aligned with his long-held interests.
“While I didn’t know about the idea of necessarily rewilding or creating forests from scratch, I have had a very deep love for nature, for wilderness, for regenerative farming for a number of years,” Andrew says.
That love came in his mid to late 20s when he did farm stays and workaway opportunities in New Zealand, Hawaii and Oregon. “Each of those experiences, you just live on the land for a month, two months at a time. And I just felt like this was my calling. I needed to figure out a way to make a living doing this kind of work.”
When he learned of the Miyawaki method, he felt a connection.
“I’m thinking about climate change and just the need for humanity to really act quickly in this next 10-year window of what we can do. And that’s why the method really speaks to me on a personal level, because this is a way to kind of jumpstart nature’s processes and get a fully functioning forest brought into fruition that can sequester carbon in as little as two, three years. And I think we just need that kind of action right now.”
The Miyawaki method calls for planting saplings of native trees more densely than they would grow in nature.
Photo Courtesy of Andrew Lampl
The History of the Miyawaki Method
Dr. Miyawaki was born in 1928 in a small farming village. He grew up with a deep fascination with weeds and ecology and came of age during the brutal realities of World War II, Andrew says. “He was seeing devastation all around him. He actually had to travel through Tokyo right after a firebombing there during World War II to take his entry exam for the agricultural school that he ultimately went to.”
Andrew explains that Dr. Miyawaki studied among constant daily reminders of humanity’s absolute power for destruction. “And he was convinced that plants and functioning ecological systems were the answer to regenerate what’s been lost.”
Dr. Miyawaki would later study weed ecology in Germany and developed a deep fascination with potential natural vegetation, or PNV. “The concept of PNV is, what would the true vegetation be in an area if you removed all human intervention, all human impaction from that area? What are the true native indigenous plants and trees that would rise up?” Andrew explains.
Dr. Miyawaki worked to identify potential natural vegetation and create a bank of appropriate plants that are culturally appropriate and climate resilient for regeneration.
“Dr. Miyawaki had a dream while he was studying in Germany of what’s called a chinju-no-mori, which are these protected indigenous forests behind or surrounding different shrines or temples in Japan,” Andrew says. “And in this dream, it just became very clear to him that these were old, sacred, protected forests that had been in protection for 400, 500 years or more, and that these sacred forests probably held the key to Japan’s potential natural vegetation.”
He moved back to Japan after this dream to work to reclaim Japan’s vegetation. He spent the next 10 years studying at Shinto shrine forests all over Japan. Using high level categorization techniques, he classified what all the potential natural vegetation would be.
“In doing all this work, he started to realize there were commonalities between the forests essentially delineating the different canopy layers that he found,” Andrew says.
The layers include the overstory (high canopy), understory, shrub layer, herb layer and moss layer.
“All of these were working in tandem to create this very rich, biologically diverse thriving forest where it was sequestering 30 times more carbon than a monostrato grass lawn,” Andrew says. “It had 20 times more diversity and was just a really beautiful, thriving ecosystem. And from there he realized that he might be able to ecologically engineer quick-growing native forest using these techniques, and he developed what was called the Miyawaki afforestation method.”
A slide from Andrew’s master’s thesis defense on the Miyawaki method.
Photo Courtesy of Andrew Lampl
The Urgency of Afforestation
The natural succession of a forest from bare ground to a climax native forest could take 300 or 400 years. Andrew says Dr. Miyawaki reasoned that humanity doesn’t have the luxury of time, especially at the rate that deforestation, urbanization and global sprawl are impacting native lands.
The Miyawaki afforestation method, when followed to a T, can create a thriving native forest in two to three years and a self-sufficient beautiful forest grove in 10 years, according to Andrew.
Miyawaki forest gardening can be implemented in a 3-square-meter pocket garden with as few as seven trees, or a garden can be as large as you have the space for.
Understanding the Miyawaki Method
The Miyawaki method has four prongs to achieve an intensely planted natural forest.
- Create as close to a forest floor as possible for a planting site. Excavate or decompact the soil to at least a foot deep and add organic material such as compost, straw and leaves to make a soft, pliable medium that tree roots can flow through. Add a mycorrhizal inoculation to jumpstart the mycorrhizal network that helps the roots connect to each other and to organic matter.
- Select as many diverse species as possible from your area’s potential natural vegetation. Consult state extension services, local Indigenous communities, ancient artwork or other resources to identify tree species that are native to the area.
- Once you have selected as many species as possible, create a guild of the different canopy layers. For example, in a row with 16 square meters that are waiting to be planted, each square meter would get one high-canopy tree sapling, one mid, one low, and potentially some ground cover plants as well. Rather than planting in a straight line, stagger them around with no two trees of the same species directly next to each other. The goal is three or four saplings per square meter.
- With the plants in place, mulch with organic material such as arborists wood chips to suppress weeds while the trees and plants get established. Keep the site watered and weed free for the first two years.
Photo Courtesy of Andrew Lampl
How Can the Miyawaki Method Succeed?
With such intensive planting, I have to wonder how trees and plants can fare well in the unnaturally crowded environment.
Permaculture designer Wilson Alvarez, the woodland steward at Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education in York, Pennsylvania, has been planting a Miyawaki forest since 2018. He explained to Andrew that it comes down to the coalition of three C’s: Competition, Cooperation and Communication.
Above ground, saplings planted close together compete for sunlight, which sparks them to grow taller faster. The cooperation comes in underground, where roots and the mycorrhizae work together to improve the soil and the nutrient uptake for all plants. Plants also communicate through chemical signals, alerting each other of pest and disease pressure so they can put their defenses up.
Andrew says the dense thicket of trees will thin itself out over time. The survival rate may be 60 or 65% after five years — an example of survival of the fittest.
“I know certain foresters are not going to be comfortable with that kind of success rate, and I’ve heard some pushback saying that’s too much of a loss to deal with,” Andrew says. “But it really depends on your goal and timeline that you’re working on.”
Andrew’s Miyawaki forest is 3 years old going on 4, and he can attest that the Miyawaki method works. It’s about the size of a tennis court. The area was solarized with a tarp before excavating and adding organic material and compost.
Andrew partnered with the Keystone 10 Million Tree Partnership, which is funded by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and aims to plant 10 million native trees planted in Pennsylvania by 2030. The program makes available every spring and fall a bank of bare root native trees and plants. Andrew picked 16 species and ordered 750 bare-root trees, which were free.
The clear achievers were the tulip poplar, sweet gum, black locust, eastern redbud and quaking aspen. One that did not do well in the Miyawaki method were pawpaws — a native fruit tree.
Andrew says it’s magical to have gone from planting leafless twigs to two years later being surrounded by beautiful, towering trees.
“I just felt very proud and very moved that I had created something like this and that the method really did work,” he says. “It was just heartening to see.”
Trees larger than a sapling take a while to recover from being transplanted and acclimating to their new environment. But a sapling of no more than a year old adapts quickly and thrives in the appropriate environment. In fact, a sapling can catch up to and surpass a larger transplanted tree.
Andrew adds: “For the skeptics out there, there are so many case studies that exist. It’s well documented — it’s on YouTube. Dr. Miyawaki himself was responsible for planting over 1,700 of these Miyawaki forests and something over 40 million trees that he was responsible for putting into the ground through his coordination, through his teams.”
The Miyawaki method yields quick results.
Photo Courtesy of Andrew Lampl
I hope you enjoyed my conversations with Andrew Lampl on the Miyawaki method. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Have you tried the Miyawaki method or experimented with creating a mini-forest in your space? What was your experience? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 382: The Tree Collectors: Amy Stewart’s Tales of Arboreal Obsessions
Episode 400: Defending a Native Garden From Misguided Laws
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
GGW Episode 104: Phipps Conservatory-The Greenest in the World
Miyawaki Method Planting Schematic
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens
Keystone 10 Million Tree Partnership
Territorial Seed Company – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Proven Winners ColorChoice – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
