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A woman showed up at the forest with a water bottle. There were 1,500 trees on the site. She walked past 1,499 of them and poured her water onto one.
Christina Delfico watched her, confused. Then the woman explained: that was the tree she and her son had planted together on planting day. She’d been coming back every week to check on it.
Another visitor told Christina she’d planted hers for her abuela.
A 19-year-old named Julius, who’d lived on Roosevelt Island his whole life, started appearing at the forest with a camera. He was a birder. The forest had given him a new reason to be outside — and a new neighbor to talk to.
This is what Christina did not expect when she set out to plant New York State’s first Miyawaki method pocket forest. She expected an ecological intervention. She got that. But she also got something harder to plan for and harder to measure: a reason for people to show up, stay, and come back.
The day everyone’s face was happy
On April 6, 2024, 400 New Yorkers gathered on a 370-square-meter site on Roosevelt Island and planted 1,500 native baby trees into the ground. A Congress member came. The New York Times was there. Within 72 hours, it had gone global.
Christina told me she kept looking around — in slow motion, she said — and everyone’s face was happy. The only other time she’d felt that particular feeling was at her wedding. That specific joy where everyone is there out of love and out of something larger than themselves.
“Only this time,” she said, “it wasn’t for two people getting married. It was for the forest. And the potential of the future.”
I’ve been thinking about that line since we recorded this. Because I think it names something the urban greening field struggles to articulate. We’re good at the carbon math. We’re decent at the stormwater calculations. But we don’t often talk about what it feels like to plant something you know you’ll never see fully grown — and do it shoulder to shoulder with 399 strangers who showed up for the same reason.
An oak, Christina reminded me, grows for 300 years, lives its middle life for 300 more, and spends its final 300 dying. We are brief visitors to that timeline. Planting one together is an act of radical optimism.
What is the Miyawaki method, exactly
The method was developed by Akira Miyawaki, a Japanese botanist who spent decades studying native forest ecosystems. His insight was that if you plant canopy, sub-canopy, shrub layer, and ground cover all together — densely, intentionally — you trigger something underground. The wood wide web: mycorrhizal fungi holding the tips of the roots, trading sugar for nutrients the trees couldn’t access alone. A forest that would normally take a century to mature can be compressed into a decade.
Christina’s organization, iDig2Learn, partnered with SUGi to bring the method to New York. SUGi is a global reforestation company founded by Elise Van Middelem, who came, notably, not from ecology or conservation, but from advertising, branding, and fashion. That background turns out to matter: SUGi doesn’t just plant forests, it builds the story around them, the community engagement, the press, the proof of concept that makes the next city want one too. In six years, SUGi has planted over 250 pocket forests around the world. I did the math. That’s roughly one per week.
Read and/or listen more about SUGi and their UK Forest Lead, Adrian Wong: S6E7 👇
The connection started with a New York Times article in the summer of 2023 about SUGi’s work. Multiple neighbors forwarded it to Christina on the same day. She emailed Elise that week. By next week, they were on a call. Christina already saw it finished.
That’s the producer in her. Christina spent 20 years at Sesame Workshop as an Emmy-nominated producer. The producer’s skill set, as she described it: see the end, get the right people in the room, don’t take no for an answer. She had a planting date — April 6 — before she had permission for the land.
“Find the people who will say yes,” she said. And then, deadpan: “It’s that easy.”
What the forest did that no one expected
The ecological case for a pocket forest on Roosevelt Island is easy to make. The island sits in an estuary — brackish water, storm surges, the real climate threat of what happens when you’ve built a city at the water’s edge. Trees with deep roots and compost-rich, spongy soil absorb what the city can’t. Mother Nature, as Christina put it, knew this for millions of years. Humans are the new kids on the block.
But the emotional case is the one that surprised her.
Beyond the woman with the water bottle and the girl planting for her abuela, what Christina found is that the forest gave people something she hadn’t fully anticipated: a socially acceptable excuse to be outside. You can show up alone. You can show up as a widow, a retiree, a single parent, or someone who just read an article and didn’t know what else to do. The forest is the pretext. The community is the outcome.
She also told me about her toddler nature group — two and three-year-olds who sit under a giant northern red oak and learn its name. Last week, a two-year-old correctly said “horse chestnut.” Christina described her reaction as: my job here is done.
I bring up a statistic often in my talks: the average child can name more than 1,000 corporate logos, but fewer than 10 native plant species in their own neighborhood. Christina is fighting that number one toddler at a time, starting at age two, because the brain before age three, she said, is an open sponge. What goes in tends to stay.
The gateway drug problem
New York City currently sits at around 21% tree canopy cover. The goal is 35%.
I asked Christina whether there’s any danger in the pocket forest excitement — whether the novelty of planting new baby trees might pull attention away from the harder, less photogenic work of protecting mature trees that are already there. A mature street tree sequesters dramatically more carbon, filters dramatically more air, and shades dramatically more pavement than any sapling.
She didn’t think so. A pocket forest, she said, is a gateway. You come for the planting day. You start noticing the oaks on your block. You start caring about the mother trees because you finally understand what a tree actually does.
“Nobody needs a bunch of lollipops just sticking there,” she said.
She also told me about sitting at a planning meeting for Forest for All NYC, announcing she was about to plant the city’s first Miyawaki pocket forest, and watching a retired parks commissioner say they’d had the chance to do this years ago and hadn’t moved forward. That same parks department showed up with 25 staff members for a tour the week after planting day.
Proof of concept is more powerful than any policy argument. Nobody wants to be first. Once it’s done, everyone wants to be second.
On planting with the people who knew this land first
One detail I didn’t want to skip past: in the six months of preparation before the planting, Christina worked with the Lenape Center in New York City, alongside Ethan Bryson — SUGi’s forest maker — and members of the Yakama Nation.
In his journals, Henry Hudson recorded beach plums blooming in abundance along the shores of what he was calling a new land. The Lenape Center shared something more specific: those weren’t wild. They were cultivated orchards. Planted intentionally, for food.
The Manhattan Healing Forest now has beach plums in it.
I keep thinking about what it means to call a plant native. It’s not a botanical technicality. It means every butterfly and bird in the region evolved alongside it, knows it for food, shelter, and seed. When you plant native, you’re not just adding greenery. You’re restoring a relationship.
You can visit the Manhattan Healing Forest at South Point Park on Roosevelt Island — it’s public, free, and even findable on Google Maps! Take the tramway, the F train, or the NYC ferry. Read more here.
Find Christina and iDig2Learn on Instagram at @idig2learn and even here on Substack, at @idig2learn!
Happy trails,
Nadina
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Sponsor note: The Bernard van Leer Foundation generously supports this season, and I’m honoured to be a Van Leer Fellow — exploring whether urban nature can truly fulfill our evolutionary need for wilderness during the most formative stages of life: pregnancy, early parenthood, and childhood. Christina’s work (hello, toddler nature groups!) sits at the very heart of that question.
