New Orleans is a landscape paradox – a city largely below sea level, which continues to sink as the sea rises outside the levee walls that protect it. Despite its capacity to produce a tremendous amount of biomass and ecological diversity, the city’s urban forest has been in decline since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In the Garden of the 21st Century New Orleans, we are testing the potential of the Miyawaki method of forest planting to create possibilities for a new type of urban forest in the context of frequent disturbance and climatic precarity.
The Garden of the 21st Century New Orleans is an effort to respond to the unique ecological condition of New Orleans in the form of a garden. The project is under the umbrella of the Garden of the 21st Century research project at the Chair of Being Alive at ETH Zurich, which aims to study the capacity of designed land management practices to regenerate soil health and biodiversity. The project has sites in Switzerland, Spain, and Chile, and New Orleans is the first field site in the US.
New Orleans faces many new challenges in the next century due to the increased frequency and duration of extreme weather events, including drought and hurricanes. The city has lost 4’000 acres of tree coverage since Hurricane Katrina, a 30% decrease in total tree cover amounting to nearly 10% of the city’s area . Congruently, New Orleans has one of the highest urban heat island effects in the US, as well as a lack of bioretention areas for stormwater absorption . However, the region’s subtropical climate has immense capacity to produce biomass and host biological diversity. The Miyawaki method of planting – in which late succession species are planted very densely at a young age – is an apt strategy to test in this context, due to its quick rate of growth, resilience in extreme weather events, and capacity to contribute to a robust urban canopy.
We are partnering with the Center for Sustainability, Education, and Development (CSED), a community-based organisation rooted in the Lower Ninth Ward to enhance the latent potential of their public garden on former residential parcels by cultivating a dense planting of over 35 native species while creating opportunities for local youth to be involved in planting, ecological data collection, and stewardship. In the autumn of 2024, we completed site preparation and phase one of construction, planting over 350 individuals and 35 species on a 10 m x 33 m parcel. After developing the Potential Natural Vegetation (PNV) list from research on local and historic ecosystems, the initial step in the Miyawaki method, we worked with a local research nursery, Rotglow Farms, to grow all the trees from seed or cuttings harvested locally to reproduce genetics specifically adapted to the unique ecological context of New Orleans. Rotglow also produced a custom mycorrhizal inoculum cultivated from local forest soils to encourage beneficial partnerships as the trees get established. The existing soils on site were also amended with compost and woodchips from Schmelly’s Soil Farm, who collect food scraps from the city of New Orleans and compost them with woodchips from local arborists.
By testing the Miyawaki method in the highly specific and challenging context of the city of New Orleans, we hope to contribute to the knowledge and suite of possibilities for adaptation and urban forest recovery in a city at the frontlines of climate change.
Bonnie Kate Walker is a landscape architect and scientific assistant at the Chair of Being Alive at ETH Zurich, where she contributes to teaching and research on drawing languages for living systems and regenerative practices for soil health and biodiversity. At the Chair, she has co-led the design and implementation of the Garden of the 21st Century in Senan and New Orleans and played an integral role in establishing Switzerland’s first Master of Science in Landscape Architecture program. She is also a co-founder of the landscape design and research collective Office of Living Things (officeoflivingthings.com), whose work centres on social justice and long-term ways of thinking about land. Bonnie-Kate’s research focuses on understanding, testing, and applying regenerative land practices through design, fieldwork, and experimental land management. LAM, OASE Journal, LA+, and GTA Verlag have published her work. She received her MLA from the University of Virginia in 2017 and has since practised landscape architecture in New York City and Zurich.
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