Welcoming its fourth year in 2025, the Ecological Gardener Training Program with Waxwing EcoWorks brings together hands-on skill-building and in-depth exploration of our relationship with the natural world. Over 16 weekly classes, the program equips community members with the tools to design and nurture healthy habitat gardens while advocating for the wellbeing of our local ecosystems.

As we begin enrolling the next cohort of Ecological Gardener trainees, we checked in on one of our 2024 graduates, Susan, who is using what she learned in the program to transform her property near Lancaster, PA into an oasis for native biodiversity.

It’s a typical drive through the Lancaster countryside to get to Susan’s home outside of Strasburg. Little floating islands of rural suburbia wade in a sea of cropland and pasture. A tale of two landscapes unfolds out here: farmland and lawn. We might consider the tractor a keystone species in this human-made ecosystem. 

But pulling up to Susan’s property, I’m caught by a change of scenery. I dock my vessel on a special island where the tractor is losing ground, literally.

A tawny carpet of leaf litter sweeps across the front slope where, just a month ago, turfgrass reigned supreme.

It’s the antithesis of seasonal lawn care. Rather than being diligently raked and hauled away, these leaves are here to stay: the foundation of fecundity; an ecosystem-in-progress. 

In eco-gardening parlance, Susan’s steep, northwest-facing front lawn is inspired by sedge meadow ecology. Over 1700 plugs poke out of the leaf mulch like tacks on a corkboard, now setting roots for next spring’s growth. This community consists of four different species of sedges (Carex spp.) peppered with showier characters like red cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), eastern beebalm (Monarda bradburiana), hairy beardtongue (Penstemon hirsutus) and, fittingly, Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii). Such an arrangement was intentional for this highly visible space, balancing splendid variation and density with a garden-like presentation apropos for the public gaze.

Susan–who likes to go by Susie–tells me that the planting has already stirred curiosity from neighbors. She welcomes the conversations as a way to encourage folks to see our living spaces anew. “Native gardening promotes dialogue and encourages people to react in a different way,” she tells me later on, reflecting on how her experience in the Horn Farm’s Ecological Gardener Training Program expanded her perspective on the power of a small planted space. In this residential setting, she sees an opportunity to foster not just ecological health, but a revival of our relationship with nature: a pathway toward more positive, healing interaction with the land and each other.

Setting Roots and Sending Shoots

Like many folks who find their way into the rabbit hole of ecological restoration, Susie has always been fond of natural spaces. An avid hiker and frequenter of local preserves, curiosity brought her to the Lancaster Conservancy’s Habitat Advocate Classes in 2023. These experiences helped transform her appreciation into conviction about the importance of reviving nature in ecologically bereft spaces (read: lawns). 

Newly retired and ready to take action, she decided to enroll in the Horn Farm’s 2024 Ecological Gardener Training Program (EGTP). From February through May, 2024, weekly classes and field trips helped her move from tinkering with native plants at home to making intentional and informed design choices. When it came to the personal project that students undertake in the course, Susie’s focus was a shoe-in. She would set aside part of her yard to apply design tips and install a planting. In the ensuing months, the project would take off like any landscape spared of the tractor blade: blossoming exponentially. 

And so here I was, admittedly baffled when Susie led me first to the backyard to start our property tour. As it turns out, her sedge meadow slope is only the latest iteration in a yard-wide vision launched by the EGTP. In fact, the slope is the product of hiring on the Waxwing EcoWorks team; the rest of the yard is her own enterprise. Around back we visit a 700 sq ft area bordering the property corner–her “original” project site–now covered likewise with a thick carpet of mulch.

With the enthusiasm of a composer explaining her score, Susie conveys to me how the EGTP gave her the rudiments she needed to make work like this more approachable and digestible–to take ownership over something that seemed like a landscaper’s specialty. “It feels much better than taking a shot in the dark” she tells me. In rhythm with the hands-on lessons covered by the course, Susie got to work at home: measuring out the space, calculating plug counts, sheet mulching (localizing the impact by sourcing wood chips from down the road), testing the soil, assessing land use history, and observing the area’s ecological indicators to whittle down a plant palette.

I’m enamored by her self-assurance and excitement as we study her designs: a preview of what’s to come. For Susie, a big plus of the EGTP was bringing the otherwise esoteric concept of “design,” down to earth. Many aspiring eco-gardeners are paralyzed before they begin, mired in questions about where to place plants, how to space them, how they’ll behave, and, of course, what on earth to put in the ground.

Through the EGTP, Susie figured out how to navigate the overwhelm of options, coming up with a design that integrates function, habitat value, and year-around enjoyment.

It was far from desk work. When we talk about bringing “design” down to earth, we mean it literally.

A crucial part of Susie’s process was visiting local preserves with similar qualities in the baseline landscape: glimpses of what her property, centuries ago, might have looked like. She borrowed inspiration from the Lancaster Conservancy’s Shiprock Woods Nature Preserve alongside native meadowlands managed historically by fire. Coupling these references with the current state of her space, which bears a legacy of agricultural use, she arrived at a point of clarity about what her mini-habitat would be best equipped to host, and maybe even aspire to.

The resulting design is a thoughtful arrangement of 14 species. Different layers (from groundcovers to understory trees) allow her to maximize the square footage for biodiversity. Touchingly, the vision includes a seating space to enjoy the garden up close and personal–another echo of the training program’s teachings. In designing spaces for ecological health, we’re not just setting aside parcels of nature: we’re allowing ourselves to be part of the healing. We’re not ecological islands, after all. 

Diverse Refugia, all at Home

Any ecological gardener will tell you that sheet-mulching a lawnscape is enormously satisfying. Susie is no exception; in fact, with extra mulch and cardboard to spare, the process became infectious. What began as a relatively isolated project to mend a corner patch of her yard has now threaded its way into a quilt of activities across the property, including a natural border along the property line, re-designed landscaping around the back patio, and, of course, the whole front yard with her new friends at Waxwing.

One can venture to guess that 30-40% of the landscape is now set aside for ecological gardening bliss.  

As we survey these other works-in-progress, Susie shares with me another lesson gleaned from the EGTP. Even a modest-sized property like hers has its fair share of microhabitats. Little patches of yard here and there might have subtle differences in hydrology, soil drainage, shade, contour, and direction–all ecological “foundations” that suggest the suite of plants best suited for one area versus another. Inspired by the EGTP’s field trips to local reference landscapes, Susie took notice of the surprising variations that span her home turf. She closely observed existing conditions and found parallels within local habitats and plant communities. Rather than imposing her whimsy on the land, she has relied on the land’s wisdom to guide decisions.

There are many pathways for restoring a piece of earth, but when we build relationships with landscapes around us and listen, we’ll find that we’re not alone as restoration designers.

And so, in just a few steps, we move from a planned patch of shade-tolerant shrubs to a “hot and dry” exposed strip warranting meadow species. The area around the patio stacks even more functions, with a plan to install clumping grasses, buttonbushes (Cephalanthus occidentalis), and arrowwood viburnums (Viburnum dentatum) that can provide a natural buffer from runoff while dispersing water flows to other areas of the property. Wrapping up our stroll at the sedge-meadow hillside where we began, I can’t help but think of what this will look like in just a few year’s time. Take a sizable hike through multiple ecological communities, and condense it to a few paces around a house. A spot of refuge for a whole region, in a time when nature needs all the refuge it can get.

For all the savory nuances of design, reference landscapes, and plants, the lesson here is simple:

Plants are valuable allies for the shared well being of ourselves and the natural spaces we depend on, even in the smallest patch of land.

Like a heap of scraps becoming compost, just another area of turfgrass in tractor heaven is being deliberately turned over to the benefit of all life. As Susie puts it to me, the Ecological Gardener Training Program helped her see the potential of “taking small spaces and making them better for the world.”

The Joy in the Little Worlds

The EGTP is an incredible resource for practical insight. But for most trainees, Susie included, it also inspires introspection. She now sees ecological gardening as more than just a means to a regenerative end. She sees it as a process: an unfolding interaction between humans and the nature of which we’re a part–a rediscovery of our place in the landscape, rather than above it. She is motivated by the notion of reparation: of paying back for our extractive relationship with the land. Overall, she sees ecological gardening as an act of love: an invitation to work with the land rather than against it. 

She recalls to me the transformation that emerged in her as the class progressed, inspired by the attention to detail that came with observing plants on the landscape:

“I learned how to see plants in a different way. All of a sudden, I was seeing all the things I didn’t know I didn’t know.”

She jokingly shares with me how she can no longer take a casual stroll through meadow or forest, always pulled to the trail’s edge by another fascinating seed head; a pairing of plants; the finer elegance of those common species often overlooked in their ubiquity: of mayapples, Virginia waterleaf, and meadow grasses. Seeing all of this beauty in the seemingly mundane underlines her commitment to bring nature home, and she feels this is a deeper gift of the program–that invitation to deep noticing, which may be just as healing to people as the action we take to restore the land.

I stop to take a picture of Susie posing in front of her sedge meadow slope. Below to my left, I catch a glimpse of something peculiar in the basal green of a wild violet (a volunteer, but welcome in a place like this). We peer in to sight a red caterpillar circled with black studs like cactus needles. Susie gasps with exhilaration, and in that moment I can hear the truth of the love she’s told me about. “That’s a fritillary!” she exclaims. A variegated fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) like this has piqued her interest before; she spotted one while going about her eco-gardening routines some time ago, and it spurred her into a flurry of research. She’s always interested in learning more about who she’s building habitat for.

“I’ve already seen, even at the beginning, more happy critters here than I’ve seen before.”

That’s a promising foretelling for an island of biodiversity that’s only just starting to bloom. And with the help of the Ecological Gardener Training Program, more and more folks across the region are planting refuges like this, and not just independent homeowners like Susie. Ecological landscaping professionals, community doers, teachers, and advocates are popping up like plugs in leaf mulch, all inspired to turn the tide and re-balance our relationship with the wild spaces we depend on.

It’s only a matter of time before little islands like Susie’s merge into a continent.

Join the Ecological Gardener Training Program in 2025!

Registrations close on Monday, January 27th at 12PM EST.

Over 16 weeks of hands-on learning with our educational partner Waxwing EcoWorks, trainees dig deep into designing and nurturing native plant habitat to help build back biodiversity in the places we live, work, and play. Learn more and let us know you’re interested at hornfarmcenter.org/ecological-gardener-training/

Scholarships are available to offset program costs.

About the Author: Andrew Leahy

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. While studying English and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student in the college’s Office of Community Engagement. Now, going on three years at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew manages social media, develops and teaches educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, foraging, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature. Andrew has completed the Horn Farm’s Land Steward Training Program (2023), Ecological Gardener Training Program (2024), and teaches monthly foraging walks, alongside co-teaching the Horn Farm’s new Forager Training Program.

Each year, the Horn Farm Center hosts a popular festival for a strange and fleeting native fruit–“America’s forgotten” pawpaw. The Pawpaw Festival is just one of the many ways we connect people with the natural landscape.

Ever tasted, or even heard of, a pawpaw?

This unusual native fruit–a northern outlier of an otherwise tropical fruit family–grows in abundance across forests and hillsides in the Lower Susquehanna Riverlands. With a shelf life that lasts in the blink of an eye, pawpaws are a tantalizing treat of the late summer for locals and visitors alike, which is why the York County Pawpaw Festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2024, is now a 4-day extravaganza highlighting all the “Wild & Uncommon” offerings of our vibrant landscape.

Bringing together unique local foods, native plants, nature-based education, and the iconic pawpaw that started it all, the 2024 Wild & Uncommon Weekend will take place from September 26th to 29th. At the center of these festivities, the Horn Farm Center is hosting the annual Pawpaw Festival on September 28th from 9am to 5pm. Pre-purchased tickets are required to attend.

This popular event is often the first thing that comes to mind for locals who’ve heard of the Horn Farm Center. For many curious visitors, too, the Horn Farm is a one-day nexus for sampling the alluring pawpaw. In fact, many festival-goers over the years hail from New England, the Midwest, Florida and Georgia, and even as far as Canada, all drawn to the region by this peculiar fruit! The event features pawpaws for sale alongside local environmental organizations, native plant nurseries, nature-focused activities, and regional food vendors, many offering special pawpaw-inspired goodies!

But unlike the pawpaw, with its seasonal limits and notoriously fleeting shelf life, the Horn Farm Center offers an abundance of learning opportunities all year around. If you’re planning to join the fun for the Horn Farm’s 2024 Wild & Uncommon Weekend, it’s worth getting to know a bit more about the small, resilient, and locally-rooted nonprofit behind this big event!

The Horn Farm Center’s mission is to foster ecological learning through land stewardship, community partnership, and hands-on experiences. Established as a nonprofit in 2004 after locals came together to halt development on historic farmland, the 186 acres that make up the Horn Farm Center are forever protected under the York County Farm and Natural Lands Trust. This preserves over 250 years of agricultural and natural heritage; moreover, it provides a space for visitors from York County and beyond to grow in connection with the local landscape.

Educational & Transformational

The Horn Farm Center cultivates that connection in many ways. Classes held throughout the year help people explore diverse pathways for deepening their relationship with the natural world. Popular examples include foraging walks, composting workshops, rustic cooking and fermentation classes, and multi-week training programs on topics like regenerative land stewardship, ecological gardening, foraging, and sustainable beekeeping. Next to the Center’s historic farmhouse and summer kitchen, dozens of community garden plots quilt the land, providing a valuable resource for local green thumbs to grow food for family and neighbors.

Innovative & Inspiring

Across the wider landscape, the Horn Farm demonstrates innovative approaches to restoration and agriculture. Plots supporting local farm businesses rub shoulders with active restoration areas promoting biodiversity and ecological health. Prolific rows of elderberry, American hazelnut, willows, and other perennial crops provide food, medicine, and materials while also bolstering stream health along the farm’s margins. Many of these spaces have been planted and continue to be tended with the support of volunteers.  

Some areas are even intentionally progressing toward total wildness. As part of restoration efforts in over 16 acres of riparian (streamside) zones, the Horn Farm has planted dozens of high-density, biodiverse “mini-forests.” These Miyawaki forests, named after the Japanese botanist who pioneered them, are the first plantings of their kind on the east coast! 

The common thread across the Horn Farm’s agricultural and natural spaces is one of unity: bringing together what are often considered divergent approaches to land management. The Center demonstrates how farming and health ecology can work in harmony to promote the long-term wellbeing of people and place. 

Thinking Like an Ecosystem: Ways to Grow Connected

So, while the Wild & Uncommon Pawpaw Festival brought over 2000 visitors to the farm in recent years, the Horn Farm is always a busy ecosystem–buzzing with class participants, pollinators, tour groups, volunteers, beneficial soil microbes, community gardeners, migratory birds, patrons of local businesses, and all the members of our regional ecological food webs. 

Everyone is connected by a love for working with and learning from the earth: an essential part of growing greater ecological and community wellbeing.

Interested in exploring the many ways you can join the Horn Farm ecosystem? Consider registering for a class, volunteering, donating, or scheduling a tour with your school or community group. And of course, don’t forget to save the date for the York County Pawpaw Festival and Wild & Uncommon Weekend, happening September 26-29, 2024.

Explore Classes: hornfarmcenter.org/classes/

Explore Training Programs: hornfarmcenter.org/training-programs/

Explore Tours: hornfarmcenter.org/tours/

Explore Volunteering: hornfarmcenter.org/volunteer/

Explore the Land: hornfarmcenter.org/virtual-tour/

Explore Business Sponsorships: hornfarmcenter.org/sponsorship/

Donate: hornfarmcenter.org/donate/

About the Author:

Andrew Leahy (Community Engagement Coordinator)

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. 

While studying English Literature and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew develops and leads educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, manages social media, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, ethical foraging, ethnobotany, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.

Outside of the Horn Farm Center, Andrew enjoys spending his time hiking the trails of York and Lancaster Counties, going for bike rides, cooking nourishing local (and oftentimes foraged!) meals, reading, journaling, and frequenting York County gems like Leg Up Farmers Market, Refillism, and York Central Market.

Planting Seeds of Resilience:

The Miyawaki Method

Planting Seeds of Resilience is the fourth installment of the Horn Farm Ecosystem blog series. Through monthly articles, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting the forests, regenerative fields, and ecological action sites of the Horn Farm Center to explain our stewardship work, uplift nature, and inspire love for the land. Read past installments by scrolling down our blog page.

“Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light. This is no paradisal dream.”

– Wendell Berry (from Work Song: A Vision, 1977)

They’re unassuming from a distance. Nestled among the familiar marks of land restoration and farm activities, these plots of vegetation don’t necessarily command attention to the untrained eye. Beyond missing them completely, a new visitor might gloss them over as fallow edges or, how dare we!, would-be agricultural plots in wild disrepair. Whatever the impression may be, there is no ready clue to the wandering onlooker that what they’re seeing is actually extraordinary.

Step closer, however, and curiosity begins to spin.

Your eyes dart up, down, around, and into an impossibly dense cluster of flora, frenetically dappled and dizzying. Ablaze in summer green or tangled tawny in winter, every inch is taken up: branches and stems colliding with leaves of kaleidoscopic shapes and sizes, cascading upward and downward at once. The wind flicks and this sea of vegetation expands and contracts in unison, somehow luxurious and chaotic, like a single organism revealing to you their nested layers of complexity.

It’s a grand experience to have while standing on a modest mowed path surrounded by farmland and the noise of passing traffic. Somehow in spite of this, visiting these plots evokes the feeling of standing in a towering, boundless forest, abuzz from floor to canopy. Their greatest departure from this bucolic setting lies not in biological richness, as you might expect. They’re simply … compact.

The mesmerizing embrace of a century’s old woodland: condensed to the length of a fallen tree and the width of a deer’s leap. At the time this blog was published, the tallest trees grace 15, 20 feet–but you can easily imagine them shooting upward rapidly in a rebuke to time’s slow churn. So yes–somehow, the young, fresh, miniature community you’re touring is so recognizably a forest. Less than five years old, and already beckoning the scurries, buzzes, and wingbeats of diverse wildlife, as if time has accelerated and you’re peering into a wild future contained in ~20’ by ~8’.

Present and future are mingling in this big tiny forest–one of dozens that are taking shape across the Horn Farm Center.

Five years ago, Woodland Steward Wilson Alvarez began an experiment with students in the Woodland Steward Training Program–the predecessor of the Horn Farm Center’s current Land Steward Training Program. The prompt was straightforward: plant a ton of trees and shrubs in a little bit of space–little, as far as tree plantings are concerned. The site for this experiment was selected for its utility: paralleling the relentless highway that slices by the Horn Farm (Rt. 30 for our sympathizing community readers), these plants would create a border against noise, road pollutants, and an unsavory view. If, of course, the high-density, high-diversity approach would take. Counteracting the management recommendations of conventional riparian buffer planting, this experiment shelved the tree tubes and mower-centric spacing in favor of a new catalog of ideas. What would happen if, instead of planting individual trees, we approximated a forest? What if success hinged not on human tending but on trees tending, urging, and animating each other?

Four short years later, nestled among the familiar marks of landscape restoration and farm activities at the Horn Farm, this planting has transformed an exposed highway-side border into just what our stewards envisioned: a wall of forest, teeming with beauty and biodiversity that surpasses its simple protective function. Wilson was betting on a method he had stumbled upon while studying approaches to wildland renewal on degraded landscapes–a method employed worldwide but only just gaining traction in the United States–and it worked superbly. This was the Miyawaki Method for forest building. Since helping us keep a highway at bay, it has become a staple of expanding land stewardship actions at the Horn Farm Center.

The Miyawaki Method: Origins, Urgency, & Promise

Dr. Akira Miyawaki, the Japanese botanist and ecologist who originated the Miyawaki method, arrived at his revolutionary approach to building forests from a similar tension: seeing a human-made problem, and envisioning how trees might provide the solution.

The Japan of Miyawaki’s pre-World War II childhood was changing drastically. Rapid economic growth in the wake of the war resulted in levels of pollution and deforestation unseen in the country’s history. Amid this march of environmental degradation,¹ he took notice of how native forests were well equipped–often better than human infrastructure–for withstanding the natural disasters afflicting Japan during this time period. In particular, he noticed how natural forest resilience averted further human tragedy time and time again, giving an emotional edge to a scientific question.

Stirred by this conviction that age-old forests provided both direct and indirect security to the human communities around them, and pairing this with the world-scale disfigurement of forests amid rampant industrialization, he devised a method that, in many ways, was already millions of years into its own devising.

To recoup forest health in a scalable way, Miyawaki took inspiration from the forests themselves.

What we call the Miyawaki Method is really a modified short-cut of the forest’s method for becoming a forest: recreating the conditions for the most mature community of plants in a natural forest to develop, but doing so at a rate that matches the pace of their collapse—fast.

Arriving at this method was far from fast. A key influence in Miyawaki’s method came with spending ample time among the sacred forests of Shinto shrines. Shinto is an Indigenous Japanese religion that, like many Indigenous animist spiritualities, recognizes the divine in the natural world. From this reverence, worshippers have taken care to cultivate and protect biodiversity around religious sites, creating sacred pocket forests called Chinju no mori. The richness of these centuries-old forests is based on the tending of vegetation most suited to the conditions of a particular place. While biologically sound, this is at its core a spiritual approach: Shinto holds that nature’s health is based not simply in the presence of life, but in the presence of the members of a natural community resident to a specific place. Over time, this management ethic generated pristinely layered and heterogenous forests, where small space made no small work of diversity. The key, Miyawaki observed, was verticality; he saw these forests as “time capsules, showing how indigenous forest was layered together from four categories of native plantings: main tree species, subspecies, shrubs, and ground-covering herbs.” Overall, the treasured forests of Shinto care infused their wisdom into Miyawaki’s approach, from the selection of species to the emphasis on vertical space to the conviction that small areas could still serve as repositories for diversity and resilience.

Over time, Miyawaki honed his approach to build a capital M “Method” that incorporated that additional consideration absent from the Shinto guidebook: urgency. In the Miyawaki Method, forests move from a counterpart to spiritual practice to a counterbalance against environmental damage. Working with government ministries, cities, schools, and industrial companies, he oversaw the planting of hundreds of “environmental protection forests” on exposed tracts that were otherwise considered negligible. You could say that the Shinto conception of a human space wrapped in a forest’s embrace was infusing its way into secular modern life.

Miyawaki’s work in Japan quickly leaped into mainland Asia, and he became a spokesperson for his method globally. Insisting on forested landscapes as countermeasures to all scales of human overreach–from pollution to climate change–his method casts attention to the narrow, the little, the forest-less, and the seemingly infertile. How could these degraded spaces be reawakened to a point where they resemble the functions of our shrinking and threatened existing forests?

“It was human activity that turned much of the world’s land into an unproductive semi-desert, and it must be human efforts that restore at least some of this area.”

– Akira Miyawaki

Miyawaki in North America: From the Ground Up

It should be clear now that the adjectives associated with Miyawaki’s approach to landscape restoration encapsulate an urgency for the work: rapid, dense, diverse, and resilient. Words like these took the method global, but it’s only just beginning to take root–literally–in eastern North America. The Horn Farm Center has planted away at the cutting edge of that rooting, taking up the method to address both immediate concerns and a legacy of deforestation that has scarred the Mid-Atlantic region. For context, a brief hike is in order: to survey the recent history of forestlands in the eastern US.

It’s well understood that prior to European colonization, much of the east was covered in forests. These included forested lands independent of human influence and thoughtfully-stewarded forest-mosaic landscapes favoring the edible, medicinal, and infrastructural species that Indigenous peoples relied on. As settlers encroached and imposed their version of production, swaths of forest were cleared like never before, and the characteristic species and ecological relationships of the region–refined over thousands of years–began to unravel. A 2013 article comparing pre- and post-colonization forests in the northeast traces this drama concisely:

“For more than 10,000 years native people cleared modest areas along waterways and seasonal settlements and managed some upland areas through sporadic understory burning. Even so, the region was overwhelmingly forested and chiefly governed by non-anthropogenic disturbances and successional dynamics until around 1650, when two centuries of logging and agricultural clearing were initiated that removed more than half of the forest cover and cut over almost all of the rest. Outside of the far north and rugged mountainous regions, the northeast became a predominantly humanized agrarian landscape.”

By 1900, Pennsylvania in particular had lost more than 60% of its forests to agriculture, logging, and industries like iron production–the remnants of which remain scattered throughout our Lower Susquehanna region. Once dominated by forests so thick “it seems almost as if the sun had never shown on the ground since the creation” (1743)², a landscape that was biologically and climatologically primed for bold, diverse forests was quickly supplanted by monocrops and moonscapes. It was, of course, the humidity, density, and complexity of dynamic forests and their shifting waterways (did somebody say beavers?) that built the arable soils so desired by settlers; but with the soil-building process undermined by intensive agriculture, soils depleted, erosion spread, and the seed bank of the past dwindled.

As populations concentrated and the American “breadbasket” shifted to the Midwest, agricultural expansion plateaued and a process of natural reforestation in abandoned areas began. This, alongside state remediation efforts and updates in logging policy, did contribute to a “rebound” in forest quantity during the 20th century, but as we can see today, many challenges remain.

Namely, the land is missing most of the ingredients that built the dynamic, productive, mosaic ecosystems of the past.

The legacies of the last 300 years have compacted, eroded, and denuded soils; confined and contaminated waterways; extinguished or extirpated ecosystem engineers like beavers, wolves, and passenger pigeons; introduced novel species that are highly adaptable to unfamiliar conditions; and diminished our own sense of place in relationship with the landscape: tenders, gatherers, and fire-makers partaking generatively in ecological world-building. Human activities have even disoriented the carbon cycle, with climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions exceeding the rate at which natural systems like forests can recoup carbon from the atmosphere.³ It’s enough to induce a feeling of grim paralysis, but returning to the point: while we’ve certainly made strides in addressing ecological impairments through our households, industries, and communities, the full recovery of wild spaces stands against these odds. Any regenerating forest in the northeast is growing on a radically altered foundation, absent many of its ancient counterparts, strained by ongoing development, and under a rapidly changing climate.

All told, the Miyawaki method surfaces as a compelling addition to the toolbox for recovering dynamic, productive, and resilient northeastern forests. Designed for (modern) human-impacted landscapes and driven by the urgency of stacked environmental crises, it’s especially equipped for the situation we find ourselves. The services that forests provided are needed now more than ever, from protecting water quality to providing cooler microclimates, to diversifying food and material sources, and calling carbon back to the land to make climate change manageable. A way forward that expedites the revival of these services is evident, we believe, in Miyawaki’s east-coast debut at the Horn Farm.

Planting a Miyawaki: In Praise of Chaotic Biomimicry

Since Wilson’s initial experiment on the highway’s edge, the Horn Farm Center has undertaken the planting of over a dozen Miyawaki plots across our restoration landscape. This is the highest concentration of Miyawaki-inspired plantings in the east, with the 2018-2019 installations being the first of their kind on this side of the continent. The work of pioneering the Miyawaki method for eastern temperate forests has brought, collectively, 38 native species to our recovering landscape, as well as countless birds, insects, beneficial soil bacteria, fungi, and other beings that would not have found refuge when the land was conventionally farmed.

As mentioned earlier, the Miyawaki method is less about growing individual trees and more about approximating a mature, biodiverse forest in a short period of time. It’s an extension of a broader restoration concept called “biomimicry,” or imitating the structures, strategies, and relationships found in nature to aid in its recovery and solve human design challenges. So how does Miyawaki biomimic? And how does it move impaired land to a dynamic forest state so rapidly?

As winter transitions to spring and the prime time for tree planting approaches, the Horn Farm Center hosts classes led by Wilson that dig deep into the process for establishing a Miyawaki forest. A written summary cannot do any class justice, but some of the essentials are covered below, and “digging deep” is the step one:

Deep Soil Preparation

Just as a house requires a sturdy foundation, a forest requires stable soil. In a natural system, soil is built over time by decomposing layers of vegetation and organic materials. With each stage of ecological succession–or the movement of natural landscapes from initial “pioneer” species to forest species–the soil conditions are improved. Most agricultural and developed landscapes degrade soils by keeping natural elements “locked” in an idle or liminal state, thereby excluding the processes by which materials and nutrients cycle through the land and build living soils. These landscapes are also mowed, plowed, sanitized, and bereft of deep-rooting vegetation, exposing vulnerable topsoil to erosion while compacting the ground to the detriment of potential vegetation.

Landscapes like this are not prepared for forests, which grow out of the improved soils of previous successional stages. Therefore, in planting a Miyawaki mini-forest, we need to manually improve soil conditions to make the plot conducive to the mid- and late-successional forest species we are going to introduce. Practices for priming soil include decompaction by “double-digging” and aerating, the addition of organic matter like leaf mulch and compost, and inoculation with fungal mycelium typical of forest soils. It’s worth noting that Miyawaki stewards avoid undoing these improvements by not stepping on prepared soil areas–an experience strangely reminiscent of the “floor is lava” game. Together, these practices enable air flow, improve water retention, nurture the soil biotic community, and grant the return of regular nutrient cycling that sustains soil over time without artificial inputs.

Potential Natural Vegetation

“Potential Natural Vegetation” (PNV) describes “the hypothetical ecological potential of a piece of land” or “theoretical endpoint of succession.” In practice, it constitutes the overstory, understory, shrub, and herbaceous species that would characterize a mature natural space unaffected by human impacts. PNV is usually the outcome of natural succession, whereby hardy (“weedy”) pioneer species create the conditions conducive for perennial grass and shrublands, which create the conditions conducive for early forests, which transform overtime to mature layered forests. The Miyawaki method bypasses this time-intensive process for a similar result, favoring the community of species most appropriate for the environment when it reaches its “climax” state.

This high-diversity assortment collectively improves more soil, retains more water, and inhales more carbon than the modest plot size might suggest, thanks to variations at both the terrestrial and subterranean levels: staggered heights, root depths, shading/sunlight preferences, growth habits, and ecological roles. The inherent diversity of PNV also boosts resilience against disease and disturbance, with plants better equipped to exchange resources, and no single genetic vulnerability dominating the space. For the Horn Farm’s eastern temperate plantings, PNVs include overstory trees like oaks, hickories, and sycamores, understory trees like eastern redbud and dogwood, and shrubs like buttonbush, elderberry, and viburnums.

High Density, High Randomization

“In natural forests, fertilization is done by the wind or by wandering pollinators […] It is a total random disorder. This Chaos model is an optimized system. This tactic is the best protection from windstorms, powerful floods or even heavy snowfall.”

Indeed, the Miyawaki method embraces the game of chance that governs forest dynamics. This means relinquishing the human impulse to control or design. Once determined, species are interspersed arbitrarily, and at a seemingly precarious density: 18 to 24” apart. 4000 sq feet, in this case, can accommodate 1500 trees: the outcome of the Horn Farm Center’s 2020 volunteer plantings. Density like this bucks the cultural notion of cutthroat competition defining ecological relationships, which is a dangerous misreading of Darwin to say the least. High density planting actually stimulates the dance of mutual and competitive interactions found in forests: urging plants upward while fostering cooperative exchanges below ground, aided by the mycelium added during soil preparation. It also maximizes the presence of roots with which beneficial soil microorganisms develop their own symbiotic relationships. What appears to be a paradox–a coexistence of cooperation and competition–yields upwards of 90% survival in Miyawaki plantings.

Now, there are a few recommendations to placate a desire for order, and these help to ensure randomization doesn’t inadvertently compromise diversity. For one, the species categories represented in a given Miyawaki plot–those being canopy trees, understory trees, and shrubs–can be mathematically parsed out into different proportions depending on planting goals that might accompany landscape renewal, like creating bird habitat, a food forest, riparian cover, etc. Plantings can also be divided between “major” and “minor” species representations, with 5-7 species chosen for 50% of the whole and a large amount of alternative species set aside for the other 50%.

STUN: Sheer, Total, Utter Neglect

Over the history of the Earth, most forests became forests without human intervention. Being forest-adjacent, a Miyawaki plot is no different. That brings up another human impulse to stem during the process of mothering a Miyawaki: the desire to tend to its growth with watering, weeding, fertilization, etc. Weeding in the first year in areas prone to encroachment from prolific species is one exception, but otherwise, barring unexpected circumstances, the longevity of a plot is best achieved when it’s left to fend for itself. Trees watered too routinely become dependent on a consistent watering cycle, which isn’t reflective of the natural world, especially one undergoing climate change. After potential weeding in the first and second years, a third-year Miyawaki plot is usually self-sufficient and self-sustaining: filled out by trees helping themselves and nudging each other through a marriage of cooperation and competition. Part of the joy in the Miyawaki method is casual visitation, to watch maturity unfold in a digestible time frame–ten times faster than conventional restoration tree plantings.

Rewilding & Reintegration: Spreading the Miyawaki Seed

The smallness of a Miyawaki planting is its greatest strength. While the scale of ecological wrongs to be righted is unutterably daunting, stepping foot on a path straddled by two Miyawaki mini-forests–surpassing ten feet in just two growing seasons–is enough to temper the despair and recognize that seeds, small as they may be, are solutions. If allowed, Miyawaki plots will cast themselves outward from their nuclear origins. The seeds and pollen they produce as they mature will grow forth from those confines where humans gave them life, moved by birds, insects, wind and rain, and ourselves. New sprouts will volunteer in the nearby landscape, just as new ideas will take root in backyards, schoolyards, farmyards, and those other once-forested lands left barren by a myopic vision of progress. Planting a Miyawaki forest gives nature its missing pieces while piecing together our own sense of place on the land, as we re-learn what it needs to grow, thrive, and give immeasurably on and on:

“Mini-forests are where we touch life. We explore our place, discover what is native, restore our soil, nurture a small ecosystem that restores life. Watching a mini-forest grow several feet a year, watching it become more complex and beautiful in front our eyes, knowing that it has a direct impact on the biosphere and atmosphere—these relationships feed us. They feed our longing to make a difference, our need to connect to what is regenerative and act. Facts do not change our minds. Actions change our minds. As we get involved with the acts of regeneration […] our sense of self and what is possible transforms. A mini-forest of ideas and hope is born within us as well.”

– Paul Hawken, “Forward” in Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World (2022)

1) Deforestation worldwide is an ongoing crisis. Between 1990 and 2015 the world lost 129 million hectares of [forests], which equals “two Texases.” Deforestation is responsible for an estimated 5 billion tons, or 17 percent, of annual global carbon emissions, not to mention soil erosion and biodiversity loss.

2) Journaled by John Bartram while traveling up the Susquehanna River in 1743

3) With an estimated loss of 270 kilohectares (khas), or 667,184 acres, of forest cover between 2001 and 2022, Pennsylvania emitted the equivalent of 94.6 megatons (Mt) of the greenhouse gas CO₂ from deforestation alone. 1Mt is roughly equivalent to a space filling a cube 27 feet tall, wide, and long (imagine a cube made of telephone poles), so that much carbon fills a three-dimensional space of about 2,554 feet–about half a mile tall, wide, and long. The importance of these regional numbers is underwritten by their concurrence nationally and internationally.

About the Authors:

Andrew Leahy

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. While studying English and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student in the college’s Office of Community Engagement. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew manages social media, develops educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, foraging, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.

Mel Beans

Mel is a rising junior at Franklin & Marshall College pursuing a B.A. in environmental studies and public policy. After taking an environmental justice course and diving into research on “forever chemicals,” she realized that she wanted to pursue a career that actively acknowledges and addresses the ways in which the environment is deeply interconnected with and integral to our wellbeing. She jumped on the opportunity to intern at Horn Farm Center, seeing how our mission aligns with her passions and career goals. As the Education & Communications Intern, she’s grateful to contribute to HFC’s essential role in demonstrating not only sustainable, but regenerative and resilient agriculture by assisting with research and outreach. In her free time, she enjoys being with friends and family and in nature, thrifting, listening to music, and watching video essays. On campus, she is a house advisor and the president of Catastrophic Relief Alliance, an F&M organization that addresses housing needs locally and nationally, especially in the wake of natural disasters.