Montrealers to plant microforest beside busy Quebec highway

Yoann Dhion got the forestry bug thanks to his father, an arborist.

Now, he's taking his enthusiasm for trees to a whole new level by helping set up a microforest project on the side of a Quebec highway.

"No one would ever have thought of planting a forest here," Dhion said, pointing to a strip of grassland, a few metres from Highway 640.

He and Groupe RPL — a disaster restoration service — are planting some 300 plants on a plot of ​​100 square metres at the end of the organization's parking lot in an industrial park in Boisbriand, about 35 kilometres north of Montreal.

"I wanted to make gardens on the roof," Sébastian Doyon, president of Groupe RPL, said.

Since the structure of the building did not allow this type of installation, he got in touch with Dhion, a bakery manager who has been toying with the idea of ​​microforests for several years.

"The initial idea came from Japan," Dhion said. "Professor [Akira] Miyawaki went to look for tree seeds in Japanese cemeteries, because they are sacred places and there were native species from Japan."

A team from the non-profit Hyf Urban Forests also chose some 20 native species to plant in Boisbriand.

"There will be several species of maples," Charles Marty, a member of the organization and a researcher in forest ecology at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi, said. "For conifers, we will put white pine, spruce, larch. The small space will also have many shrubs and fruit trees."

The goal is to recreate a natural forest by placing 300 plants in a small space.

"The density is such that not all the trees will be able to survive, some will die," Marty said. "This structural complexity makes it possible to design habitats for many species, be it birds, small mammals, rodents."

He said the project aims to check whether such a microforest can survive at our latitudes. In 2021 the borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie planted two forests of this kind in Montreal, but the practice is still uncommon.

Microforests are much more numerous in Japan and India, where they have been established since the 1970s, Dhion said.

"We have the first measurements from Japan and the results are impressive," he said. "First of all, it grows 10 times faster than a traditional forest."