Micro-forests are generating real excitement in Southern California, and when I first heard the buzz, I was skeptical. The method was developed in Japan and Europe, places that are wetter, greener, and nothing like our dry Mediterranean climate. I also couldn’t find much solid data comparing it to traditional revegetation approaches. It felt like a trend worth watching, not necessarily worth trying.

What changed my mind was visiting the Ascot Hills micro-forest and speaking with the person who designed it, Katherine Pakradouni of Seed to Landscape. Her thoughtful approach to adapting this interesting method to our climate was intriguing. So we gave it a try in our nature park — and the experience was so much fun, so community-building, and so full of practical lessons that I wanted to share how we did it.

If you’ve been curious about whether this approach could work in your own space — a school garden, a park corner, a large backyard — this is for you.

What Exactly is a Micro-Forest?

The term comes from the Miyawaki method, developed in Japan and now being adapted for our drier, Mediterranean climate by local horticulturists. A micro-forest isn’t just a patch of trees — it’s a designed system with five key characteristics:

• Small footprint, big density. You don’t need acres. Our planting was just 1,000 square feet.
• All locally native species. Plants that evolved here, suited to our soils and seasonal rhythms.
• Tight spacing — just 2 to 4 feet apart. Counterintuitive, but crucial to how the system works.
• Multiple layers: canopy trees, sub-trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants all planted together from the start.
• A successional design. Fast-growing plants shelter and condition the soil for slower growing, larger species.

That last point is the real magic. The pioneer plants — fast-growing subshrubs and perennials — create shade, add organic matter, and improve soil structure, accelerating the growth of the canopy trees that will eventually take over. In theory, as those larger trees mature and close the canopy, the pioneers get shaded out, and you’re left with a self-sustaining woodland.

The practical payoff: dense native planting crowds out weeds, shaded soil holds moisture longer, and the whole system gradually requires less watering and less maintenance. For anyone who has wrestled with a weedy, compacted, degraded urban site — and I have, for years — this is a genuinely exciting prospect.

It will speed up the growth of healthy habitat, and lead to greater success for the larger trees that take longer to get established. Having worked for years in an area that was weedy and degraded, I understand how hard it is to transition to healthy native plant habitat from compacted, nutrient-poor soil full of weeds and their seeds.

Our Micro-Forest Journey

The Miyawaki method was designed for wetter, more temperate climates. Adapting it to Southern California takes specific expertise. We worked with Katherine Pakradouni, a horticulturist who has been refining this approach for our region through multiple installations. Each project teaches her something new. You can see an example of Katherine’s work at Ascot Hills.

Katherine provided more than just expertise on local growing conditions — she ran a workshop, planned the planting event, and oversaw the installation.

Step by Step

Step 1: Hold a public workshop first.

Before we planted a single thing, Katherine led a workshop in the park. I wasn’t sure who would come. What showed up was a crowd of people of all ages, curious, attentive, asking genuinely great questions. This step alone built the community investment that made the planting day so successful. Don’t skip it.

Step 2: Plan your plant list using a calculator.

Katherine calculated the number of canopy trees, sub-trees, shrubs, subshrubs, and perennials needed for our 1,000 sq ft site. She uses a plant calculator that you can use to generate a list for your own space. The ratio of plant forms matters — it’s not just “plant a bunch of natives.”

Step 3: Use color-coded flags to mark planting zones.

On planting day, different colored flags marked where each plant form should go. Green flags for canopy trees (oaks, in our case), other colors for each successive layer. Volunteers, including children and people with no gardening experience, simply picked a plant from the right category and planted it near the matching flag. The arrangement within each zone was loose and organic, not precise. This kept things moving and kept it fun.

After planting, the group spread mulch to help moderate soil temperature and suppress weeds. They were instructed to avoid crowding the base of the plant with mulch.

Step 4: Plant in the right conditions.

We got lucky, it had rained heavily the week before our planting, leaving the soil moist but not waterlogged. Be sure to water thoroughly several days before a planting if it has been dry. We watered each plant on planting day, and I came back the following day to check that none were planted too high or too low, they were evenly moist, and that the soil was firmly packed around the roots.

Step 5: Water by feel, not by schedule.

We experienced an unseasonably hot stretch right after planting, and I won’t pretend I didn’t worry. But rather than watering on a fixed schedule, I checked both the plants and the soil before each watering decision, and kept an eye on the forecast. In the two months since planting, I’ve watered twice beyond the initial soak, roughly every three weeks. Softer plants like mugwort wilted a little in the heat but recovered. We lost very few plants overall.

Step 6: Keep up with early weeding.

Volunteers have been pulling weeds before they can spread and reseed. This is the most important maintenance task in the early months, before the native planting fills in enough to suppress them on its own. Make it a regular volunteer activity — it’s easy work that keeps people connected to the project.

Why This is One of the Best Community Projects We’ve Done

I’ve run a lot of volunteer plantings over twenty years with Friends of South Pasadena Nature Park. This was unquestionably the most successful one, and I think I know why.

The word “forest” does real work. When someone asked at the workshop why we call it a micro-forest — after all, Southern California’s woodlands are sparse and scrubby, nothing like the towering forests most people picture — Katherine’s answer was perfect. Forests speak to people. Everyone knows what a forest means. They evoke something wild and alive and worth caring about. Call it a “pocket-scrubland” and you’ve lost people before you’ve started.

Science and conservation have too often left the public out, and we’ve paid a real cost for that. Projects like this are a way back in, something tangible, visible, and genuinely collaborative happening right in the middle of the city.

Keeping Track (Despite Myself)

I’ll be honest: I am notoriously bad at keeping records. In my dream version of this project, I’d be meticulously logging every watering, tracking which plants have died, measuring how much each survivor has grown, and noting exactly how many volunteer hours we’ve spent weeding and watering. That level of documentation would make this a genuinely useful data point for comparing micro-forests to traditional revegetation — the kind of data I went looking for and couldn’t find when I first started researching this approach.

Alas. I don’t have it in me. What I can do — and am doing — is take photos. My husband rigged up a removable iPhone stand so I can return to the exact same spot and document what’s changed over time. It’s not rigorous science, but it will tell a visual story. Two months in, the growth has already been impressive enough that I’m glad I started early.

If you’re more disciplined than I am — and most people are — this is genuinely worth monitoring carefully. We need more real-world data on how micro-forests perform in Southern California conditions. Even simple records: which plants thrived, which didn’t, how often you watered in year one, how much time weeding actually took. That information would help the next person trying this.

What to Expect

Two months in, the growth has been impressive.

The long-term vision: a cool, shady wooded area that blends seamlessly into the surrounding oaks, walnuts, elderberries, and sycamores – with paths winding around it, and no obvious seam between planted and natural.

But the micro-forest is already working, in the way that matters most. It has brought people to a corner of the park that was trampled, dumped in, and forgotten for years. It has inspired genuine curiosity about the natural world. That’s the real success – and it happened before the first tree even reached knee height.

Come see it for yourself. Visit South Pasadena Nature Park and take a walk past the micro-forest.