POCKET FORESTS

 Stepaside

We have lost so much and found so much. A year ago I’m planning my next dinner as a journalist whose main gig is as a restaurant reviewer. But already my head is elsewhere. Writing about food and farming brought me to forests in November 2019 and a native woodlands training course with Powerpoint presentations in a hotel room in Enniskerry. As with all conferences the best bits happened in the breaks – chatting to a young forester about lucrative Sitka spruce compared to mixed native woodland, head versus heart stuff; or sitting beside the student with a plan for an organic tree nursery. “We are,” he said memorably, “a forest people who have lost our forests.”

Over lunch, a scientist explained ash dieback by opening his fingers to mimic the cup-like fungus which open on the spine of fallen leaves and release their spores into the wind to infect the next tree. An airbourne plague. Now it feels like a whisper of what was to come.

On the field trip to a Wicklow hillside, we stood where a deer fence had allowed oak and holly seedlings to grow bright and green through the brown leaves on the forest floor. Among those mother oaks and their healthy offspring, a deep sense of peace flowed up through my muddy boots and into my bones. It was miles from the noise, traffic and pile-driving frenzy of my inner city neighbourhood in the country’s most nature-deprived district.

For a few weeks it’s back to the “real world” of deadlines, feasts and veganuary. Then the real world is tossed in the air. My friend Ashe Conrad-Jones sees the shutters pulled down on her event business. We escape our new lives as homeschooling shut-ins to prowl our 2k lockdown with an idea – a Ted talk about Tiny Forests, an urban planting method that can put native woodlands into small places. It seems urgent and relevant in a way that everything else suddenly doesn’t.

We set about our research. Zoom conversations, advice and planting plans from India, Britain, The Netherlands and Limerick, where An Taisce’s education project ‘Choill Bheag’ is rolling out small forests. Everyone is helpful. Generosity comes with the territory. We figure out what we can use and what seems counter-intuitive and costly. We set up a social enterprise and call it Pocket Forests.

When I mention our hastily-built website in a piece hanging up my critic’s fork, people started contacting us from as far away as the west coast of America and as near as the road at the end of my street. We take on some garden clients and three schools. Then we work on soil using slow permaculture, no-dig and hugelkultur (a horticultural technique where a mound constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass plant materials is planted as a raised bed) ideas to get it breathing. We dip into the vast waste stream around us – bike shop cardboard to stop the grass growing, horse manure from city stables, coffee grinds, composted food waste, woodchip and jute coffee sacks from a local roaster. My husband jokes that our car now smells like a tractor.

“What would a forest do?” Ashe and I often ask ourselves, at first jokingly and now in all seriousness. Because forests start out scrappy and opportunistic. Pioneer species

Ashe at Mercy College Inchicore

grab whatever space they can and begin to try to build a forest system. And when the mowers or grazers or sprayers put a stop to their dreams, forests go elsewhere. It’s as good a business model for a startup in a pandemic as you’ll find.

We have read and watched and learned so much about trees and their ecosystems and could spend the rest of our days happily continuing to do that. Even if you hate trees they do you good, quietly cleaning your polluted air, taking the burn out of hot days and the flood out of extreme downpours, making life feel lighter than it should, as the Pulitzer prize winning writer Richard Powers writes in ‘The Overstory’.

Architect Roger Ulrich proved their powers to aid recovery in the 1980s when he looked at the records of gallbladder patients in a Pennsylvania Hospital over nine years. The patients whose rooms had a view of trees recovered more quickly and needed less pain relief than the patients who looked out on a brick wall. Working with soil is richly therapeutic and enormous fun. The transition year students go from recoiling at worms to celebrating their gorgeous juicy presence.

We are digging where we stand and when lockdown eases we have soil ready for more than 700 trees, shrubs and wildflower seeds and plugs grown from wild Irish seed. This year we hope to figure out how to spread our pockets wider and dream of establishing an inner-city tree nursery. With less than 2% of our forests in native woodland, so few of us have stood in or smelled or listened to the sounds of an Irish forest, never mind had the chance to help create a version of one in our neighbourhood. To care about something, we need to know it. We need tangible experiences with nature. Forests, even pocketsized ones, can bring flourishing health and wonder to life in front of our eyes. We can facilitate them and then step back, letting the plants, who possess more wisdom than we ever will, do what they do best. Pocket Forests is as much a happiness project as it is an urban foresting one. In our depleted reimagined lives, we need hope of regeneration. Now more than ever. www.pocketforests.ie