HK’s first mini cooling forest by SCMP
On a blazing hot Monday morning in August, environmentalist Camilla Zanzanaini led a group of schoolchildren, each holding a tree sapling, a shovel and some wood chips, onto a small fenced-in plot.
Then – at first tentatively, but with increasing enthusiasm – the unlikely landscaping crew set to planting the city’s first “tiny forest”, using a method pioneered by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki.
“He studied forests for 30 years and found if you plant native species very densely, they will start supporting each other, so you’re actually planting a forest,” said the 36-year-old founder of the social enterprise Nature Makers Lab.