A food forest grows at Brandeis

Brandeis Stories

A food forest grows at Brandeis

By David Levin
Photos courtesy of Justin Koizumi and Rachel McKane
September 22, 2026

Brandeis has a new kind of garden. On the lawn outside Perlman Hall, beneath an old oak with a hanging swing, a team of dedicated students spent the past summer planting a food forest - a landscape of native, edible plants designed to feed the campus for years to come.

What is a food forest?

"It's supposed to be like a living ecosystem," says Rachel McKane, an assistant professor of sociology and the project's faculty advisor. "You have a canopy structure, you have smaller trees, you have bushes and shrubs underneath that, and then you have ground cover."

Here, native pawpaw trees form an understory beneath the oak. Below them grow serviceberry, black raspberries and roughly 30 blueberry bushes, then a ground layer of American cranberries, native strawberries, mountain mint and ferns. Two pollinator gardens sit among the beds, and a prickly pear, New England's only native cactus, holds down a sunny corner. Paths wind through it all so the fruit, once it comes, is easy to reach.

"Once it's established, it won't need us to water it or maintain it, but it will still grow food that the community can eat," says McKane. Everything will be free for the picking, and she hopes for community harvest days when crops like blueberries ripen.

A student-led space for connection and community

The project began indirectly in McKane's classroom. She teaches about food forests in her environmental justice course, highlighting them as a way for communities to build resilience, and this past year, her students took the idea and ran with it. A group led by seniors Justin Koizumi, Spike King, and Ashley Kim received a $12,000 grant from the Brandeis Campus Sustainability Fund to cover plant purchases, installation, and maintenance. "I hope the food forest will serve as more than just a location," Koizumi says. "It has the potential to be a space that brings people together."

Senior Spike King buys new plants for the food forest at a nursery in Swansea, MA.

An experiential approach to the liberal arts

McKane is quick to note that the scope of the forest's planting is modest, but feeding the entire campus was never a central reason for creating it. "A food forest doesn't need to produce enough calories to feed an entire community to contribute to food sovereignty," she says. "It can be a supplemental food source, a seed and plant resource, an educational space. It's a catalyst for building deeper relationships to the land around us, and to each other."

There are practical benefits too, she adds. Perennial roots soak up stormwater, and the canopy cools the ground. For McKane, the forest also represents a new way for students to interact with the campus environment. "At its core, it's a form of experiential liberal arts," she says. "It's a great way to help students reconnect with the nature around them."