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By the time the lime tree poked me in the ear, I’d already given up on trying to look composed.
We’re sitting in the middle of the Forest of Thanks in Parsloes Park, East London. My hair is caught in brambles, something twiggy is definitely inside my sock, and there’s a yew tree nudging my shoulder like an impatient dog.
Four and a half years ago, this was a lawn.
Today, it’s a 10,000 m² forest of 30,000 native trees. Oak, elder, lime, cherry, yew. Layers of canopy and understorey so dense that, from the outside, the forest reads as a single volume of green.
And somewhere in that weave, there’s a fox.
Adrian Wong, SUGi’s UK Forest Lead, tells me about the time they flew a drone over this very forest to take monitoring shots. Later, reviewing the footage, the team froze on a frame: a fox, curled up, mid-nap, suddenly awake and staring directly up at the drone, as if to say: Excuse me. I was using that.
None of them even knew it was there.
We talk a lot about “creating habitat” as if we’re granting permission for nature to enter. In reality, these pockets of life feel more like invitations. The moment you loosen your grip on a piece of land, there is an almost shocking speed with which something else moves in.
Foxes. Tawny owls on the South Bank. Parakeets threading their way across the city. Kids who’ve never held a spade before.
All of them finding a way back in.
The size of a tennis court
SUGi calls these sites “pocket forests”—tiny but potent ecosystems. The sweet spot, Adrian says, is about the size of a tennis court: 260 m². He now shepherds 31 of them across London. Globally, SUGi has planted more than 250 forests since Elise van Middelem left the advertising world to devote herself to ecological regeneration just six years ago. And that advertising background is exactly what sets SUGi apart: storytelling is in their DNA (just look at their Instagram).
A tennis court is such a humble unit of measurement.
We’re used to talking about forests as something vast and far away. Places you fly to. Places a government protects (or doesn’t) somewhere out of sight. But a tennis court? Every city in the world has a hundred forgotten spaces that size—grass verges, leftover corners, rooftops, vacant lots, the dead zones around car parks and estates.
SUGi calls what they do urban acupuncture: finding precisely those overlooked sites and inserting a sharp, concentrated dose of life.
A stitch of canopy between two parks. A scrap of woodland in a schoolyard. A thicket on a traffic island where previously there was only noise and exhaust.
You don’t need a national park to shift a city’s nervous system. Sometimes, you just need enough needles in the right places.
The three rules of a tiny forest
The method behind these mini-woods is the Miyawaki method, named after Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki. Adrian explains it in three steps:
Plant absurdly dense
Two to four trees per square meter. In conventional forestry, you might leave two meters between each sapling. Here, a young oak and a cherry might be just 30 cm apart. To a horticulturist, it looks like chaos. To a forest, it looks like succession fast-forwarded.Treat soil as a living system
Most urban soils, Adrian says, are “dead or very close to it.” So SUGi rebuilds them: composts, wood chips, sometimes nutshells to aerate, mycelium, worms—ingredients that keep releasing nutrients slowly over the first three years while the forest establishes. It’s not about feeding individual trees; it’s about waking up the whole underground.Mulch like your survival depends on it
Because in the first years, it does. Thick mulching keeps moisture in, suppresses aggressive weeds, and, crucially in cities, makes irrigation mostly unnecessary.This year, London had an unusually dry spring and summer. Out of 31 forests, only three needed watering. Once. Survival across the network? Around 87%.
When he tells me that, I think of something else: Adrian is the only person responsible for maintenance on all 31 London forests.
One person. Thirty-one sites. Monthly checks. Some light weeding where bindweed might strangle young saplings. The odd remedial intervention.
That’s it.
In a world where we’ve been trained to see nature as something incredibly fragile—something that will die the moment you look away—the idea that one person can “look after” 31 forests mostly by paying attention and leaving things alone is quietly radical.
Messy on purpose
As a trained horticulturist, Adrian admits the hardest part of this work isn’t the physical labour. It’s the restraint.
Traditional horticulture prizes tidiness: pruning at the right time, deadheading, weed-free beds, and carefully shaped shrubs. The Miyawaki method asks for almost the opposite: plant densely, then get out of the way.
Leave the broken branches. Let things die where they fall. Allow weeds to speak for the soil—telling you, through their presence, where there’s compaction or deficiency. Intervene only when a species is about to smother the whole system (hello, bindweed), or when human safety is at risk.
“It’s still a struggle for me,” Adrian laughs. “You see something, and every part of your training wants to tidy it. But the weedkiller doesn’t just kill the weed. It kills life in the soil, too.”
We talk about aesthetics. About how English garden culture has exported a particular vision of beauty—manicured lawns, tightly controlled beds, clean edges—to the world. And how hard it can be to convince people that “wild” can be a compliment, not a criticism.
But as regulations like the UK’s biodiversity net gain rule (requiring new developments to increase biodiversity on site by at least 10%) kick in, wildness is becoming less an option and more a necessity. Grass mixes and quick wins have their place, but high-quality habitat almost always looks… untidy.
Not neglected. Not abandoned. Just alive.
A school by the runway
Of all the stories Adrian shares, the one that sticks with me most doesn’t take place in a picturesque park. It happens 300 meters from the runway at London City Airport.
There, there is a school for students who’ve been expelled from all other schools—a last chance to get their exams and a diploma. Many of them don’t have gardens. None had access to a safe green space on site.
The only available space used to be a parking lot. Over time, it became overgrown and dangerous—broken surfaces, rubble, places where kids could get hurt. It was fenced off.
When SUGi came in, they had to dig through 50 cm of asphalt and concrete before they even reached rubble. Only then could they start bringing in soil and building a forest.
There was, understandably, resistance.
Gardening isn’t “cool” when your world has taught you that toughness is a survival skill. When no one you know spends their free time in gardens. When green space is something you see in other people’s neighbourhoods, not your own.
So they started small. A few students. Some kids from a nearby primary school. A pile of tiny trees, just 40 cm high.
Because the Miyawaki method uses soft, prepared soil and small saplings, planting is physically easy. You can plant five trees in three minutes. The feedback loop is immediate: hole, tree, pat, next.
By the end of the session, the reluctance had transformed into competition:
“I planted twenty!”
“I did twenty-five!”
Group photos show big smiles and bigger attitudes. Many of the pictures couldn’t be used publicly because of gang signs. But behind those gestures, something more interesting is happening: kids who’ve been written off by the system are, for an afternoon, just teenagers having fun in the dirt.
I keep thinking about that forest a few years from now.
Planes will still be landing. The noise will still be there, though softened by leaves. Polluted air will still blow across the site, though filtered a little more each year by bark and stomata. But the biggest change might be invisible on any satellite map: the memory in a young person’s body of what it feels like to plant something and watch it grow.
Corridors into other worlds
Another of Adrian’s favourite sites is in Battersea. The forest sits just a short walk from one of London’s most beautiful parks. Yet the residents of the nearby estate rarely use that park.
“Demographic divide,” he says. One road, and a world apart.
The local community garden approached SUGi with a vision: could a forest help create a corridor—not just ecological, but social—between the estate and the park? A green thread pulling people across that invisible line?
They built the forest on a raised deck, visible from the surrounding tower blocks. Parents send their children down to play there, knowing an adult in the garden keeps an eye out. From their kitchens, they can look out over an acre of green and see their kids learning how to plant, harvest, and get dirty.
It’s childcare, education, community safety, and mental health support, wrapped in a single layer of soil.
When we talk about the benefits of urban trees, we often default to numbers: degrees of cooling, percentages of flood mitigation, tonnes of carbon stored. All vital. All true.
But when I picture this particular forest, I don’t see a graph. I see a parent looking out the window, exhaling for the first time that day. I see a child running unsupervised—but not alone—for the first time in their life.
Those are benefits that never make it into a cost–benefit analysis. Yet they’re the ones that change how a city feels from the inside out.
Recharging the green battery
At one point in our conversation, we talk about mental health and the “green battery” feeling you get after time outdoors. Adrian is working with the University of Oxford on a study examining how volatile organic compounds emitted by trees affect anxiety, pulse, and mood in people spending time near these forests.
The idea is simple but powerful: good green space doesn’t just feel nice. It changes your body, your hormones, your ability to cope. The effects can last long after you’ve left.
Most of Adrian’s working days are spent in forests, moving from site to site. Occasionally, he’s in the office for a few days straight.
“I can definitely feel the difference,” he says.
So can I. When I go too long without trees, without soil under my shoes, my brain starts to fray at the edges. Screens feel harsher. Problems feel bigger. The world seems more brittle.
We live in a time where global crises feel relentless. A broken, fragmented world, scrolling past on endless feeds. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, small, powerless.
But you cannot doomscroll with your hands in the dirt.
You cannot simultaneously dig a hole for a sapling and refresh the news. Your attention—the scarcest resource of our time—has to be somewhere else.
Maybe that’s part of what these pocket forests do. Not just for birds and bats and foxes, but for us. They give our minds somewhere else to be.
Urban acupuncture, human resilience
Near the end of our conversation, I ask Adrian what the Internet of Nature means to him.
“It’s the connection of nature and humanity,” he says. “It’s understanding that we are part of nature, not apart from it. And that by putting your hands in the dirt, by planting a tree, your life can be improved so vastly. It seems like such a small thing, but it has such a huge impact.”
I think back to that fox, caught by accident in a drone shot, staring straight up at the camera. To the teenager trying to plant a tree upside down because no one ever showed him which way the roots go. To the little boy who planted four oak saplings in one hole, proudly announcing he was “making a really big tree.”
We talk a lot about resilience in the context of climate, infrastructure, and policy. But resilient cities require resilient humans: people who can tolerate uncertainty, adapt, and feel rooted even as the world shifts under their feet.
You don’t build that resilience only in meeting rooms and strategies. You build it in places exactly like this: under a lime tree, with brambles in your hair, soil under your fingernails, and a fox somewhere close by that you might never see—but who now has a home again.
Maybe that’s the quiet genius of urban acupuncture.
You look for the tender points in a city—its concrete deserts, its forgotten edges, its schools by runways and estates by parks—and you press a forest into them.
Not with the arrogance of “bringing nature back,” but with the humility of remembering: nature never really left.
We did.
And these little patches—no bigger than a tennis court—are how we find our way home.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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