Miyawaki Forest Plantation in Chandigarh

The Chandigarh region's mature plantations already run on banyan, eucalyptus, ashoka and mulberry, among others, and thirty-one trees in the city have been formally recognised as heritage trees for having stood for over a century. A Miyawaki plot planted with species from that same proven list has a head start over one planted with unfamiliar species, since these trees are already known to handle this region's summer heat and winter frost.

We layer the plot with canopy, sub-canopy, shrub and ground-cover species in the dense, mixed pattern the method calls for, rather than rows of a single tree, since density and species mix are what let a Miyawaki plot close its canopy fast.

Where a small plot works in the tricity

A CSR forest of this kind fits on land as small as a few hundred square metres, which makes it workable on a corner of a factory plot in the industrial estates around Mohali and Derabassi, an institutional campus, or a strip of unused society land, rather than needing the acreage a conventional plantation would.

Why density matters more than acreage

The Miyawaki method plants several saplings of mixed native species into every square metre rather than spacing out a few trees over a wide area, and that density is what lets the young forest close its canopy and start behaving like a real forest floor within a few years instead of decades. It is a deliberate trade of space for speed, and it is why the method suits a small CSR plot better than a conventional plantation would.

Sukhna Lake's own catchment shows the scale this kind of planting can work at in this region: roughly 25 square kilometres of land around the lake was put under vegetation to control silt reaching the water, proof that dense planting on marginal land around Chandigarh establishes and holds over the long run.