Science Magazine: Pacific Northwest’s ‘forest gardens’ were deliberately planted by Indigenous people

“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. It’s one of the first times such ‘forest gardens’ have been identified outside the tropics, and it shows that people were capable of changing forests in long-lasting, productive ways.”