For the last seven years-plus New York City's parks department in tandem with the private non-profit the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) have worked toward planting 1 million trees in the city's five boroughs by 2017. And they've made great progress, with more than 900,000 trees (and counting) planted across the city's planters, parks and other spaces a year and a half ahead of schedule.

But in that time, Shubhendu Sharma could've grown an urban jungle, literally.

Sharma runs thestartup Afforestt, a reforestation company that uses a revolutionary planting method that enables it to transform a barren area the size of six parking spaces into a 300 tree forest in just eight months time. Or, if you prefer a bigger space, 1,500 trees in a 5,300 square foot plot.

Really, the space doesn't matter as long as it has dirt and it's at least 1,000 square feet. Sharma's techniques are so efficient that Afforestt's trees grow 10 times faster than the average tree, producing a miniature super forest that's 30 times more dense and 100 times more biodiverse than any forest planted with traditional techniques, Fast Company reports.

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So, what's the secret?

The BBC reports that a lot of thought goes into the process even before a single plant is, well, planted. First, Afforestt digs up the soil of a given future forest plot and analyzes its mineral composition to find out which plants will grow best in the soil. Any and all extras added to the soil to help the area thrive must come from within a 30 mile radius of the site.

Then, the company uses an algorithm to determine exactly where each sapling will be planted on the plot. The rest is all hard labor: tightly packing and planting together saplings up to 2 feet and 7 inches in size and watering and de-weeding the area as necessary.

But eventually, starting roughly eight months in, the maintenance slows. Soon, the forest morphs into its own self-sustaining ecosystem, albeit on a much smaller scale.

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With all that in mind, Sharma still has a lot of work to do to mass produce the process, so implementing it on the same scale as New York City's Million Trees initiative isn't quite possible yet. Fast Company reports that Sharma hopes to accomplish this by standardizing and digitizing the process -- including a database of soil types and open source soil information -- so that every environment can implement the technique, regardless of its unique set of circumstances.

"We're bringing forestation into the mainstream," Sharma told Fast Company. "We can go into a corporate office and say this is what you should do...we're making forests with the same acumen that Toyota would make cars, or that SpaceX would make a rocket."

That would be a huge deal for America's urban sprawls, not only due to the aesthetic but also for the changes it could bring to a city's climate footprint.

"Because these forests grow 30 times faster and are 30 times more dense, the carbon sequestration happens at a rate that's 30 times higher," Sharma told Fast Company. Among the other purported benefits: pollution absorption, a reduction of up to 5 degrees in temperatures exacerbated by the so-called urban heat island effect and more habitat for species like birds, that rely so heavily on tree cover.

So far, the BBC notes, Sharma's work has only been limited to India, where he's planted more than 40,000 trees, but if Afforestt mass produces the company could quickly redefine the term "urban jungle."

For more photos of Afforestt's work, visit their website by clicking here.

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A view of stumps in a recently deforested section of natural forest that will become a pulp and paper plantation in Riau province, Sumatra, Indonesia, in July 2014. Indonesia lost nearly twice as much of its natural forests as Brazil in 2012, despite its forests being a quarter of the size of the Amazon rainforest. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)