Natural History Wanderings

Bay Nature reports on How East Bay schoolyard experiments in creating forests from scratch are going, three years in.

Beside the manicured lawn at Cragmont Elementary, a Berkeley Hills school overlooking the San Francisco Bay, is a small hillside patch of tangled trees and weeds—coyote brush sage brush, wood rose, and California blackberries—that looks a bit like a shaggy patch left unshaven. It’s a place where kids are not encouraged to go on their own. Branches that have been left to grow however they please stick out through gaps in plastic fence-netting. It’s a black hole, where a ball might disappear until a teacher is able to fight off thorns and fumble through bushes.

But inside this “pocket forest,” life can be found growing and flying: Anna’s hummingbirds, chickadees, towhees, butterflies, moths, and leaf-cutting bees were noted, in a 2023 survey. And three years ago, this was just grass.

School districts across the country are tearing up the asphalt that has dominated schoolyards since the 1940s—a surface that, especially as the climate warms, increasingly reaches unbearable temperatures. Schoolyards need more trees and plants to cool down. At the same time, the job description for a schoolyard has expanded, according to Grey Kolevzon, co-director of Growing Together, a nonprofit that helps school districts in the East Bay green up and provide outdoor education. School yards are not only places to play, but to give “every student a place to be connected to the living world—like in their own school campus, and an opportunity to steward the living world, and to have that deeply impact their being.”

Read more at  The Pocket Forests Grow Thick – Bay Nature