ABOUT GREENPOP
Growing Living Landscapes. Growing Connections.
GREENPOP is a Thailand-based ecological regeneration initiative. We design, plant, and grow living landscapes, from small urban forests to larger ecosystems, restored land, greener cities, and places where people can reconnect with nature.
Forests remain at the heart of what we do. Using native species and methods including the Miyawaki approach, we create dense, resilient forests designed to restore biodiversity, improve soil, provide shade, retain water, cool their surroundings, and become increasingly self-sustaining over time.
But a forest does not begin with a tree. It begins with the land.
That understanding has expanded GREENPOP beyond reforestation alone. We look at soil, water, native ecology, climate, landscape, agriculture, and the way people use a place. Depending on the project, that can mean restoring degraded land, transforming a schoolyard into an outdoor classroom, bringing trees and permeable landscapes into cities and parking areas, developing community forests and gardens, or integrating regenerative agriculture and edible landscapes into a larger ecological system.
Our approach is practical rather than ideological. We believe ecological restoration happens through intelligent design, local knowledge, good soil, appropriate species, careful planting, and long-term stewardship.
GREENPOP brings together local expertise in native species, agroforestry, horticulture, landscape restoration, and ecological design with international ideas in urban forestry and regenerative land use. We work with nurseries, landowners, schools, communities, businesses, municipalities, designers, farmers, and volunteers to turn underused or degraded spaces into functioning living systems.
We are interested in what happens when ecological thinking becomes part of everyday infrastructure: when a parking lot provides shade and absorbs rainwater, when a school has a forest instead of another concrete yard, when agricultural land rebuilds rather than exhausts its soil, and when planting trees becomes the beginning of something rather than the end of a sustainability campaign.
From a few square meters to an entire landscape, the ambition is the same:
Make the land more alive than we found it.
The People Behind GREENPOP
Kris Wäag | Founder & Creative Director
After a career spanning publishing, fashion photography, design, branding, e-commerce, and international business, Kris turned his attention to a different kind of long-term project: restoring living landscapes.
GREENPOP brings together his experience in design, storytelling, communication, and building projects with a longstanding interest in sustainability, cities, food systems, and environmental solutions. His role focuses on GREENPOP's vision, ecological concepts, partnerships, communication, and the development of new ways to bring nature back into the places where people live and work.
Pongaraya Butchantha | Co-Founder & Ecological Director
Pongaraya Butchantha is an agroforestry practitioner, landscape designer, and licensed Thai traditional medicine practitioner. Through his nursery and years of practical field experience, he has developed extensive expertise in native species cultivation, ecological restoration, agroforestry, and sustainable land management.
His work has included collaborations on projects such as the Wonderfruit Ancestral Forest and the cultivation of diverse native ecosystems throughout Thailand. At GREENPOP, he helps connect ecological ambition with the realities of soil, plants, climate, water, and the land itself.
Apakorn Butchantha | Agroforestry & Landscape Specialist
Apakorn Butchantha has spent more than twenty-seven years immersed in Thailand's forest ecosystems. Raised on his family's agroforestry farm, which follows King Bhumibol Adulyadej's “Three Forests, Four Benefits” philosophy, he combines lifelong practical experience with formal training in plant science and landscape technology.
His professional background includes advanced nursery management, large-tree cultivation, and landscape production in Japan, as well as participation in Miyawaki forest projects alongside SUGi and Wonderfruit.
Today, he contributes expertise in native species selection, nursery operations, soil and landscape systems, ecological planting design, and long-term forest establishment. His knowledge helps GREENPOP approach each project not simply as a planting exercise, but as the creation of an ecosystem intended to grow, adapt, and endure.
GREENPOP is still growing too. We see that as an advantage. It gives us permission to experiment, collaborate, learn from the land, and expand what ecological restoration can mean in Thailand.
Every forest starts with the first tree. But it doesn't have to end there.