On a warm June afternoon, a magpie chatters in a grove of elms and willows. A beetle crawls among the leaves. The small grove next to an 18-storey building and a railway line is about the size of a basketball court; before the trees were planted, it was a car park.

Locals call this grove a forest. In the Netherlands, there are 144 of them (with 200 planned); Utrecht, whose grove we looked at in the first paragraph, has seven such forests (tiny forests).

In Europe, India, and elsewhere, residents of small neighbourhoods want to create something lasting, and these small groves or tiny forests are the local response to environmental problems. In the Netherlands, such a tiny forest was first planted in 2015; as time has passed, the idea has spread among both local authorities and landowners.