St Paul’s Unity Forest

Self sustaining pocket forest

Planted in September 2023, St Paul’s Unity Forest has established remarkably quickly, surprising and delighting the St Paul’s community. Created within the university grounds, the forest has become a source of pride for the university and a rare example of a forest growing within a learning environment in Kenya. Today, it has reached its self-sustaining stage, with a dense canopy and thick layer of natural mulch developing across the forest floor as the trees shed their leaves and regenerate. The forest has also become a valued space for students to relax, take mental health breaks and enjoy being surrounded by nature.

The entire local area was once the southern tip of the Aberdare ecosystem, though 99.9% of these native forests have been destroyed. In collaboration with local conservation experts at Brackenhurst Botanic Garden & Forest, St Paul’s Unity Forest has become home to several endangered species grown in the Brackenhurst nursery, helping to revive elements of the precious ecosystem that once flourished here. The rapid transformation has created a thriving habitat for birds, ants, butterflies and many other small insects, which have found a new home within the forest. Most of the planted species are growing at a similar rate, with the pencil cedar standing out as a particularly vigorous grower, while a smaller number of understory species are beginning to establish beneath the developing canopy.