Now, even city folk can grow their own jungle

Green warriors are using a Japanese technique to turn gardens, campuses and dumpyards into dense groves in months
Last month, Taimur Ali Khan received a rather unusual gift for his first birthday. His mother Kareena Kapoor’s nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar presented him a 1,000sqft forest in Sonave on the outskirts of Mumbai. “The trees are as young as Taimur, even younger actually, and each one of them is a local, native, climate resilient species,” Diwekar wrote in an Instagram post.
Saif and Kareena’s tot may be Bollywood royalty and a social media darling but he isn’t alone in having his own patch of forest. Across India, some startups and non-profits are encouraging individuals, institutions and companies to grow their own forests.
Seven years ago, engineer Srinivasan Ramadorai and his wife decided to keep aside a tenth of the land on which they were building their sprawling home in Bengaluru for a grove. “We had a lot of land behind the house and wanted to cut the noise and pollution from outside,” says Ramadorai. Today, the trees are over 30 feet high, and home to birds, squirrels, cats and a few non-poisonous snakes.
Afforestt, the Bengaluru-based startup that helped Ramadorai plant the grove of 150 trees, draws upon a technique created and named after Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki. The concept aims to grow dense, self-sustaining forests of native trees quickly: while a typical forest takes 100 years to mature, the technique accelerates the process ten times.
Afforestt founder Shubhendu Sharma discovered Miyawaki in 2008 when the environmentalist came to plant a forest at Toyota’s Bengaluru campus where he worked. Fascinated, Sharma decided to create a small forest in his parents’ house in Kashipur in Uttarakhand, planting 224 trees of 42 species in 2010. The 70sqm grove taught Sharma an important lesson — while native trees such as mulberry, guava and mango thrived, non-native ones didn’t do well. “Exotic species will die or dominate,” says Sharma, who is creating a seed bank for indigenous trees. “We are creating the forest that would have existed in an area without human intervention.”
The backyard forest became a business and today, Afforestt’s portfolio spans 38 cities in nine countries, and it has raised forests in villas, apartment complexes, resorts, hotels and ashrams, Bengaluru airport and Chennai metro. Sharma is still surprised by the results. For instance, in a naturopathy resort in Telangana the forest is “so dense that you can get lost in it”.
“Small patches of forest successfully create a pollution-free microclimate,” says Sharma. However, he recommends a minimum area of 100sqm for the forest to make an impact. His own mini-forest in Kashipur attracts a variety of birds such as bulbuls, cuckoos, parrots and hornbills, besides squirrels and honey bees. “The quality of air is much better. Due to this, we sleep well, and it plays a major role in our well-being,” he says.
Last year, non-profit Say Trees made news when it used the same technique to turn a barren plot of land belonging to the railways in Bengaluru’s KR Puram into a verdant forest in just five months. “We are trying to create forests that develop faster than development,” says Durgesh Agrahari of Say Trees. Earlier in 2017, the NGO created the city’s first vertical garden on the pillars of a flyover. It’s also trying to increase the green cover near lakes and on hillocks outside Bengaluru. Its most recent project involves creating Miyawaki forests in government schools in Tamil Nadu.
“It is a misconception that you need a large plot of land to grow a forest,” says Dipen Jain of Mumbai-based NGO Forest Creators. Jain, a garment exporter, discovered Miyawaki’s technique during work visits to Toyota, Honda and Panasonic factories in Japan. His most challenging project was in a textile mill in Tarapur, Maharashtra, where Jain and his partner had to convert a chemical waste dumpyard into a forest with 27,000 trees. “In just over a year, many trees have touched 15 feet,” he says.
Others are discovering newer applications for Miyawaki’s technique. Shaillie Mehta of Ahmedabad-based startup Acacia Eco was inspired to learn it after watching a TED talk by Afforestt’s Sharma. “As more people wake up to the health impact of rising pollution levels, interest in accessible green zones is rising,” she says. Collaborating with a professor from HNGU university in Patan, Mehta recently created a mini-forest of 14,000 trees within the premises of a local school, where students can take a walk.
FAST FORESTS
100sqm
minimum area required for a Miyawaki forest
3 yrs
for the forest to become self-sustaining
10 yrs
for it to grow into a mature, native forest
How it’s done
Japanese scientist
Akira Miyawaki’s technique involves planting native species close together so that they grow into dense forests that support local biodiversity
Experts identify soil type and add locally available biomass as nutrients.
No pesticides are used
The trees grow 10 times faster, and are 30 times denser than a normal plantation