feature writing

If you visit Cadillac Gardens, you can learn a lot about the southwest Detroit community that surrounds it.

If your visit is during warm weather, you’ll probably first see the lush, green plants growing tomatoes, strawberries, peppers and other fruits and vegetables. 

You might be surprised to see that underneath all this greenery are clean, industrial-looking containers that hold the soil and plants. Or, that the garden containers sit on an old asphalt parking lot.

Looking around, you may also see that the garden is nestled in an area that has both homes and a busy manufacturing plant side-by-side, a hundred-year old neighborhood of modest houses from a time when workers walked to their jobs. 

If you stop to talk to some of the people who were a part of the garden’s earliest days, however, they would share an insight. The most significant thing about the garden doesn’t have anything to do with the site or the things growing there. The most important thing about the garden has been its impact on the gardeners and the community.

Sylvia Gucken works at Ideal Group, the company with the manufacturing plant across the street from the garden. She was one of the key, early supporters of its creation. She says: “We unknowingly started a grand experiment. We couldn’t have predicted what happened.”

The idea for the garden came from the neighbors living nearby.

Sarah Clark, of Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision (SDEV), meets regularly with local residents. SDEV is active in this section of Detroit that includes Michigan’s only oil refinery, a sewage treatment plant that serves 126 communities, the busiest border crossing between the U.S. and Canada, three major freeways, three steel mills, a 300-acre intermodal freight yard, and oil/metal/waste processing industries. 

One discussion Sarah had with the neighbors involved Scarcyny Park, a park at the other end of the block on Merritt Street where Cadillac Gardens is now located. 

Neighbors said they would like a park with recreational amenities, a perennial garden and a vegetable garden. Unfortunately, an in-ground vegetable garden was not possible there due to the fact that the site had once been used for heavy manufacturing.  

Today, Scarcyny Park lives up to that early vision. Through collaboration with SDEV, community groups, and Ideal Group, the park has been transformed. The beauty of its perennial gardens has made it a popular site for weddings and quinceanera parties, the traditional birthday celebration for a 15-year-old girl observed by some families in the Mexican-American community.

The idea for the vegetable garden, however, was not forgotten. 

John Bradburn, a General Motors environmental engineer, had a “resource out of place,” something he was looking for a way to recycle or reuse. Metal baskets were used to ship parts to a GM assembly plant. After that, they had no other use, effectively becoming waste. John’s first idea was to build utility trailers out of them. Another GM executive suggested he visit the Ideal Group to see if they’d be interested in manufacturing the trailers.

Frank Venegas, CEO of Ideal Group, remembers the meeting. He was not enthusiastic about the idea for utility trailers, but he remembered the suggestion from his neighbors near the manufacturing plant about a vegetable garden. As a gardener himself, he had an idea.

“How many of these baskets can I get?” he asked. Two weeks later, 250 baskets were on an unused, crumbling executive parking lot left over from the site’s former life as a General Motors manufacturing site. Eventually 331 baskets would be used. 

The baskets were loaded with soil and plants were purchased. Cadillac Gardens was on its way.  Its name, officially Cadillac Urban Gardens on Merritt, was selected in honor of the cars built there in the past. 

“We found out planting was the easy part,” Frank remembers with a laugh. “We picked the brightest, sunniest summer to start the garden. The blacktop really heated things up. Keeping the garden watered was a real chore.”

The people that lived nearby were interested, but wary. 

“The first year, our residents did a lot of watching,” says Sylvia. “We had some that really jumped in, but a lot of people were watching. My personal assessment was they had been promised things in the past, and they really didn’t believe we were going to do what we said we were going to do.”

That initial wariness soon changed.

Today, many people from the neighborhood regularly visit to pick the free produce. Others volunteer to keep the garden running. School groups and community groups also are regular visitors. In recent years, the garden and associated neighborhood improvement projects have registered 10,000 volunteer hours.

The most popular produce are strawberries, tomatoes and peppers. Nothing goes to waste, although some first-time, unusual offerings sometimes need a little explanation or even recipe cards. Sorrel, eggplants and rhubarb all needed a little of this extra marketing. 

Like Scarscyny Park, the garden is a collaborative project between southwest Detroit residents, Ideal Group, SDEV and other local businesses and community organizations. SDEV plays a leadership role, starting with Sarah Clark’s design of the environmental landscape plan and continuing with the organization’s day-to-day coordination of operations and volunteers.

“It just kept getting bigger and better,” is how Frank remembers the garden’s early days.

“The real catalysts were the children. The children brought the adults,” explains Sylvia.

Dolores Perales is a good example of that. 

She began volunteering in the garden during her sophomore year of high school, intrigued by the garden that popped up in her neighborhood.

“I live about a 10-minute walk away,” says Dolores. “I was awestruck that there was this garden, literally in an old parking lot. Looking at the parking lot while I was growing up, I would never have imagined that a garden would be there.”

Dolores volunteered during the garden’s second annual planting day. During that summer, she gave her time to maintain the garden, weeding and watering. 

“My mom didn’t want me going to the garden alone, so I started to bring my brothers,” says Dolores. She brought her brothers Christian, Nico and Eric. 

“Eventually my mom wanted to see why we were always at the garden, so she came with us. Soon, she became a garden madrina,” says Dolores. In the garden, a group of adult women who volunteer are called “madrinas,” the term for godmother in Spanish. 

“They are the garden leaders, the mothers or older women in the community who watch over and take care of the garden. They help teach the young garden leaders and other youth,” says Dolores. Today, there are eight madrinas volunteering in the garden.

During her junior year at Detroit Cristo Rey High School, Dolores became a garden leader, supervising other young garden workers. She held other leadership positions in the garden while attending Michigan State University, graduating with a degree in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Sciences. 

Now, she is attending The University of Michigan to get dual masters’ degrees in Environment and Sustainability/Urban and Regional Planning. She also has been hired by SDEV where she works as an environmental sustainability specialist, helping to maintain the garden, working with volunteer groups, and managing summer interns.

Her younger brother Christian volunteered and interned at the garden, too. Also a straight-A student, his leadership experiences in the garden helped him receive a $640,000 scholarship to Dartmouth College. 

“I think the most important thing about the garden is the multigenerational leadership that has emerged,” says Sylvia. “Now, the little kids that started volunteering in the garden are the garden leaders and managers.” 

This year, 25 SDEV youth interns between the ages of 14 and 24 will work in the gardens. For most, it is their first real exposure to a job.  In addition to gardening work, they also support SDEV air quality work and marketing. In their second year as interns, they also have opportunities for camping in northern Michigan, a first-time experience for many students who have never been outside of the city. The older interns work on larger projects in the neighborhood and the gardens.

Many of the students who were garden volunteers and leaders have gone on to college.  A good number have been hired by local businesses.

“It has provided a fertile talent acquisition program for multiple companies,” says Sylvia. The local children who have grown up in the garden and have now been hired by local business is an outcome “almost too good to be true,” according to Sylvia.

The garden’s reach has even gone beyond the neighborhood. Over 31 other urban gardens in Detroit were inspired by Cadillac Gardens and use recycled baskets from GM plants as raised planting beds.  

The story of the garden has been reported by the news media. Once a documentary crew from Germany visited, as a result the garden’s Facebook page has many friends in Germany.

Frank is happy about the positive impact of a simple garden, sometimes pondering what he calls “the weird things that have continued to happen,” as a result of the garden.  But he’s not really surprised.

“The gardens brought people together,” he explains. “Now, when there are issues or problems, people talk about it. It might be an issue for the police. Maybe a kid needs a little help. Or, a family that needs some money.”

Reflecting on all that has happened with the garden, Sylvia says: “Southwest Detroit people never want to be ‘fixed’. They want opportunities and resources and they’ll take care of business.” 

Cadillac Garden’s future will involve a major project headed by Sarah to redesign the garden to turn it into a “living laboratory” for storm water infrastructure. SDEV has received a grant and is now developing a plan to manage storm water by capturing it in underground cisterns, roofs and raingardens. 

So, as is the nature of gardens everywhere, Cadillac Gardens and its gardeners will continue to grow and change.

Photo: Cadillac Urban Gardens