miscellany

Along Canada’s northwest coast, ancient Indigenous forest gardens – untended for more than 150 years – continue to thrive. Ts’msyen and Coast Salish peoples once planted and cared for plots of native fruit and nut trees, shrubs, and medicinal plants and roots along the north and south Pacific coast, a new Simon Fraser University study finds.

Forest gardening is a common method of food cultivation and agroforestry in Indigenous communities around the world, especially in tropical regions. But the findings published in Ecology and Society mark the first time these lush, open, orchard-like plots have been studied in North America.*

• • •

“It’s striking to see how different forest gardens were from the surrounding forest, even after more than a century,” Jesse Miller, study co-author, ecologist and lecturer at Stanford University, told Science.

A neighbouring swath of conifer forest, which had been logged decades ago and allowed to regenerate naturally, contained only a fraction of the number of species.*