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.

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.