Grown using the Miyawaki method, fast-growing miniature forests in the middle of cities can bring surprisingly big benefits for people and the environment.

“It’s like going on a bear hunt!”

Not quite, perhaps, but these kids are definitely excited. They are on a visit to a miniscule patch of forest in the grounds of Queen Margaret University on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland, and are about to head out armed with a bucket of water, a jug and a stopwatch.

They are measuring how fast patches of soil inside and outside the forest absorb water, so we leave the small circular howff (a traditionally-built shelter with a wildflower roof) in the middle of the vegetation. The child in charge of the stopwatch does a couple of test runs and the pouring begins.

“I want you to decide when it’s all gone,” says Elly Kinross, the woodland and greenspace officer at Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust who is running this session for the kids. “The grass can be wet, but basically the water needs to be gone… Yeh I think that’s gone. OK, good, give it a stop.” 

This class of eight- and nine-year-olds is spending the day in a tiny forest (known, in Scotland, as a wee forest): small tennis court-sized patches of land, usually in urban areas, rigorously prepared and planted with the makings of a fast-growing, dense native forest.  

These petite patches of greenery have been springing up across the world for decades now. Japan has planted thousands; India, where the tiny forest concept was developed, hundreds. The Netherlands is a hotspot for them too, and they are also now beginning to spring up across the US. But it is the UK that has most recently seen an enormous push towards these miniature urban forests, with hundreds planted since 2020.

As I visit the site alongside these schoolchildren on a beautifully sunny spring day, I’m also on a kind of hunt. I’m trying to work out how big the benefits of foresting such tiny areas really are. As it turns out, I’ve stumbled onto a thorny, decades-long debate.

A tiny revolution 

In many countries, including my home country of Scotland, there is now a huge effort to try to reforest large areas of land. This tends to concentrate on large, unbroken patches of land, and with good reason: such forests are critical for protecting wildlife and human health and have enormous benefits for carbon storage and water cycling.

But while smaller patches of forest have historically been somewhat dismissed as useful nature reserves, they do have benefits. One big plus is that they are easier to fit into an urban area – and thus be nearer to where most people live. And emerging evidence is showing we might have underestimated their benefits for nature too.