Some scientists had argued that the “forest gardens” of the Pacific Northwest were accidental byproducts of fire, flood, or land clearing. But a study last year showed the contrary: Indigenous peoples deliberately cultivated them. ScienceMagArchives
For decades, First Nations people in British Columbia knew their ancestral homes—villages forcibly emptied in the late 1800s—were great places to forage for traditional foods like hazelnuts, crabapples, cranberries, and hawthorn. A new study reveals that isolated patches of fruit trees and berry bushes in the region's hemlock and cedar forests were deliberately planted by Indigenous peoples in and around their settlements more than 150 years ago.
Because these wild-looking forest gardens don't fit conventional Western notions of agriculture, it took a long time for researchers to recognize them as a human-created landscape at all. Many ecologists argued until recently that such islands of biodiversity, seen also in, were an accidental and fleeting byproduct of fire, floods, or land clearing. Without constant maintenance, ecologists assumed, the"natural" forest would quickly take over.
Counting and identifying the species growing on and around the former settlement sites, she found they harbored a far more diverse mix of plants than the surrounding conifer forests. The plant species also filled a wider range of ecological niches."It's striking to see how different forest gardens were from the surrounding forest, even after more than a century," says Jesse Miller, a Stanford University biologist and co-author on the study.
The forest gardens were filled with plants that benefited humans, but they also continue to provide food for birds, bears, and insect pollinators, even after 150 years of neglect. It's evidence that human impact on the environment can have."A lot of functional diversity studies have a ‘humans are bad for the environment' approach," Armstrong says."This shows humans have the ability to not just allow biodiversity to flourish, but to be a part of it.