Transformation Tuesday: An Abandoned Detroit Lot Becomes a Thriving Community Garden

Reader Contribution by Jessica Kellner
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One of my favorite stories covered in Natural Home & Garden in the last year was of the Spirit of Hope urban farm in Detroit. I was inspired to commission this story when I was interviewing people for my book, Housing Reclaimed, and one of them — Phoenix Commotion employee Matt Gifford — and I got to talking about all the amazing re-greening efforts going on Detroit. The city, often known for hardship and urban decay, has spent the past several years transforming itself, participating in its own grand regreening experiment as its citizens have decided to take back the crumbling inner city by developing community projects, planting neighborhood gardens and creating building supply reclamation sites.

I decided we needed a Detroit resident to tell this story, but all the stories I found online were by journalists who lived far from the Motor City. Then I found Kelli B. Kavanaugh, a co-owner of Wheelhouse Detroit, a bicycle shop on the Detroit River, and an editor for Model D, a web-based Detroit magazine. A highly engaged Detroit citizen, Kelli knew the lowdown on all sorts of amazing community projects going on her city, and we worked together to choose Spirit of Hope, which seemed to have the right balance of grassroots beginnings, community-wide engagement and national replicability. Kelli also enlisted the help of her friend, the wonderful Detroit photographer Cybelle Codish, who shot the garden in her uniquely beautiful trademark style. If you didn’t get a chance to read this article in the Natural Home and Garden September/October 2011 issue, I hope you’ll enjoy taking a look at some of the images and story below. You can read the full article here.

Less than two miles from the heart of downtown Detroit, the 12,000 square-foot Spirit of Hope garden was an empty lot next ot a historic church before it was transformed into a bustling community garden. Although it can best be classified as a loose farming collective, if it has a leader, it’s Kathleen Devlin (above) who helped found the farm in late 2007. Gardeners and volunteers are drawn to the officially sanctioned space as a safe spot to grow food. “Last year, we logged more than 2,000 volunteer hours,” Devlin says.

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