Akira Miyawaki

Yeah, that's the other application.

So I think a lot of your listeners know about the Miyawaki method, which is a really cool method.

Love it.

This is a different take on the method, which is less focused on soil preparation.

Miyawaki puts a lot of focus there, and it's less rigorous on maintenance.

And the reason is because...

The amount of money and effort required to fully meet the Miyawaki method is really high.

It's just not practical for most scenarios, working with a city or an ecological restoration project.

So all of the species are natives here, and specific to the literal rainforest type and then ideally and hopefully you can feel it as you walk in we're going to walk into the rainforest gully and you can see we've got ferns that we've started to plant and then these are cabbage tree ferns so you can kind of feel as you go in hopefully this will start to as it starts to develop it will also capture a lot more moisture

The project uses a Japanese planting technique known as the Miyawaki method, where different species are planted closely together to encourage faster growth.

We've learnt the Miyawaki method for planting, so you plant plants closer and then they grow four times quicker than it would normally take a century, but about 25 years to grow.

The microforest is expected to reach about seven metres high within two to three years.

And so

What we're actually looking at doing to see if we can use those trees for root stocks and then graft what we would call our cultivars in the trade onto some of those root stocks so we can then speed up the production of these trees, so we can then build this stopgap of about 20 to 30 years until we can then build in these more resilient species into trade.

As we've talked about, in Australia, we're very much enamored of the Miyawaki Forest where young people have been involved with planting their own trees and obviously learning what positive things you can do in these climate-worrying situations.

Are you doing Miyawaki as well?

We're not doing Miyawaki here at Kew, no, but there is three Miyawaki forests within London.

They've been planted in the same process as you guys and using volunteers and young children.

So it is something that's growing, and we do have those three forests in the UK that have been planted.

We won't ever be able to adapt.

Really, when we look at climate change now, it's about adaptation.