Kent County Council has been trying out a new method of planting trees borrowed from Japan. The Miyawaki method, as it is known, has been used on a site in Park Wood, Maidstone, to see if it can speed up tree growth in urban areas. The method’s objective is to restore native forests on deforested or degraded land and it has worked successfully in Asia for more than 50 years. The Trees Outside Woodlands project has experimented with an adapted version of the planting method, using urban sites with poor quality soil and a record of previous planting failures. The project has been running since 2…