Urban Orchards Bear Fruit for All

On the rise in cities nationwide, urban orchards—or even just a few native fruit-bearing trees—provide perennial food sources for humans and wildlife

By Marigo Farr
Habitat Gardening
Mar 26, 2025

ONE PARTICULAR ACRE AT THE WOODLANDS, a cemetery and national historic landmark in Philadelphia, is unlike the other 53. Here you’ll find an orchard: rows of persimmons and pawpaws; pockets of serviceberries, hazelnuts and beach plums; and more than 100 berry brambles and bushes, from gooseberries to currants to blackberries. Vegetables and medicinal plants fill in the gaps.

Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP) began planting the orchard, which serves as its headquarters and demonstration site, in 2020 with the help of community volunteers. It’s a “biodiverse space that I always just feel very in awe of, season after season,” says Sharon Appiah, who manages the cemetery site and 12 other POP orchards, including one in a city park and another at a community center. In total, the nonprofit has helped plant more than 1,600 food-bearing trees since 2007.

The benefits of the 69 orchards that POP supports are multifold. They increase carbon sequestration and reduce stormwater runoff. They expand tree cover, thereby mitigating the heat island effect that impacts nearly 1 million Philadelphians. They’re “helping reestablish ecologies in the city,” says Phil Forsyth, POP’s co-executive director, by providing habitat for wildlife frequently displaced by urban development, from zebra swallowtails that lay their eggs exclusively on pawpaws to cedar waxwings, hermit thrushes and warblers that eat native serviceberries. And they provide nourishment in a city where more than 15 percent of the population is food insecure. Last year the orchards yielded 11,733 pounds of fruit donated to mutual aid distributors or harvested directly by those in need.

“You combine all those things together, and we think there’s a pretty good justification for not only planting these orchards but having them be an essential part of city infrastructure going forward,” Forsyth says.

POP is just one of multiple groups across the country helping schools, hospitals, community gardeners and residents plant and maintain food-bearing trees in their neighborhoods. Ted Martello, an urban forester for the city of Baltimore, works with TreeBaltimore, an organization dedicated to increasing the urban tree canopy. Martello says he has seen a notable trend of Baltimore residents requesting trees that feed humans or wildlife. The city’s free tree adoption program offers only native trees—including serviceberry, pawpaw, persimmon and hazelnut—because, in addition to being beneficial to wildlife, they are less expensive, easier to manage and less likely to harm the local environment than nonnatives.

“These plants have co-evolved with all the fungus and bacteria that’s floating around out there,” Martello says, and are less likely to require pesticides or herbicides.

While peaches and other fleshy fruit have their appeal, they can attract rats if they’re not picked directly off the tree—a problem in urban environments, Martello says. But birds pick many native plants clean of any fruit that humans are too slow to grab, benefiting local wildlife and making urban planting less of a liability.

Carol Burton, director of permaculture at Urban Harvest, a food-access nonprofit in Houston, echoes the need for planting native species. “Growing vegetables—annual vegetables—is very labor-intensive,” she says. But native trees, especially those that require limited maintenance and watering, provide ongoing food sources that don’t need to be planted anew every year. She mentions a site Urban Harvest supports where a pecan tree provides a source of whole protein and fat not typically found in urban gardens.

“We cannot grow food organically or sustainably by only having vegetable beds,” Burton says. “There’s always a component of native plants, native trees, shrubs, flowers, incorporated into the gardens.”

Although POP, TreeBaltimore and Urban Harvest don’t work exclusively with native species, native plants are central for all three groups. That’s in keeping with recommendations from the National Wildlife Federation based on a 2018 paper from the journal PNAS, which suggests a goal of planting 70 percent native species in a given location.

One of POP’s flagship sites for native species is a stand of 15 to 20 trees planted in 2020 at the Wissahickon Environmental Center. While it includes some nonnatives, like Asian pears and crab apples for cider-making, one of the project’s goals is to educate visitors about the edible native plants that can be found in the 2,000-acre Wissahickon Valley Park surrounding the center. Maintained by community volunteers, the orchard features pawpaws, American persimmons, elderberries, chinquapins, chokeberries and native grapes.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Baltimore, Martello aims to expose residents to fruit trees already growing wild, like the mulberry. “We’ll lay out [a] sheet and shake the branch and collect some for ourselves,” he says of the mildly sweet fruit with a flavor often compared to blackberries. Despite mockingbirds’, orioles’ and robins’ appetite for these berries, “it seems like there’s plenty to go around.”

Marigo Farr is a freelance writer, editor and lecturer specializing in climate and equity journalism.