The canopy of trees at Therku Veedhi, in Srirangam, just about hides the concrete jungle that it has been fitted into.

The strongest of the 10,000 saplings of 53 native tree species that were planted here on December 20, 2019, have grown into a forest where birdsong punctuates the sibilance.

The ‘Nandavanam’ project, carried out in collaboration with the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple, is one of several urban ‘green islands’ that have been initiated in Srirangam, Samayapuram and Lalgudi by the Tiruchirappalli City Municipal Corporation, using the Miyawaki afforestation method recently.

“The standard method of planting individual saplings in public areas is problematic in an urban setting. We had to contend with disturbed underground drainage, bad soil quality and overhanging electricity lines, while preparing the area for plantation. That’s when my brother, a horticulturist, suggested that we consider planting trees in a group rather than individually,” says S Vaidhyanathan, former Assistant Commissioner, Srirangam Zone, who initiated the project last year.

In Chennai, the Greater Chennai Corporation plans to develop at least 10 urban forests by the end of the year, in the capital’s south region.

“Our first project in Kotturpuram, is on a site that was getting repeatedly misused as a dumping ground. The forest that has grown there since we planted saplings on January 25, has transformed the area with its greenery,” says Alby John Varghese, Greater Chennai Corporation’s Regional Deputy Commissioner (South).

The Inner Wheel women’s voluntary organisation also recently inaugurated a Miyawaki forest project at the Secretariat Gardens in Chennai. “This year, the theme of our club is ‘Nurture the Nature’. With cities becoming very polluted, we felt Chennai needed this,” says Meera Jagdish, vice president, Inner Wheel Club of Madras.

The ranks of green cover advocates who follow the Miyawaki technique — a method of sowing very young seedlings close together in small plots of land, to create a forest within 25-30 years — are growing by the day. Named after the Japanese botanist and academic Akiro Miyawaki, the method has found favour among those who want to restore vegetation on degraded land within a short term.

Some of the enthusiasm may also be partly due to the fact that India is party to the pledge in 2015 made to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) to restore the green cover of 33% of its geographical area by 2022 (only 24% is reportedly covered at present).

Taking root

Over the past few years, Miyawaki forest projects have been literally springing up all over the country, thanks to Municipal authorities and environmentalists who seemed to have found their métier in this method.

The Telangana State Government is experimenting with a version of Miyawaki through the ‘Yadadri’ method of dense plantation with no definite spacing between the saplings, which has shown good results in Warangal. In Tamil Nadu, green warriors are trying to evolve a backyard forest model that will be an income generator for small-scale farmers while rejuvenating local ecology.

“A natural forest takes 100 years to grow. But in the Miyawaki method, where plants compete for sunlight, and therefore tend to grow upwards faster than sideways, we get the same result in around 20-25 years. It will be a reasonably grown forest within 5-10 years, so it is possible for us to see them take shape in our lifetime,” says M R Hari, managing director, Invis Multimedia, Thiruvananthapuram.