In Detroit, a public garden thrives with help from an army of volunteers

Ali Rogin:

Finally tonight, as the end of summer nears, a public garden in Michigan that evolves with the seasons thanks to its meticulous design and an army of volunteer gardeners, John Yang went to Detroit for our arts and culture series Canvas.

John Yang (voice-over):

There are birds chirping, bees buzzing, flowers waving in the breeze. Tucked away on Detroit's Belle Isle, just minutes from downtown, sits a three acre public garden. It's tended to by a grounds crew that is almost entirely made up of volunteers.

Linda McKenzie, Native Detroiter:

I would say it's one of the retirement loves of my life.

John Yang (voice-over):

Native Detroiter Linda McKenzie recently traded her stethoscope for a garden trowel.

Linda McKenzie:

If I were to describe what I did as a physician, it was really about shepherding people to a better, you know, level of health. And so with gardens, it's shepherding the environment to a better level of beauty. Plants will tell you exactly how they feel. You plant something and you can tell when the soil is right and it's happy with the amount of sun. And if it's not happy, yeah, it's going to die. So they don't scream at you, they don't argue, they just do what they do.

John Yang (voice-over):

But where in Oudolf Garden Detroit they would do it was carefully plotted by Piet Oudolf, the world renowned garden and landscape designer.

In 2019, Oudolf showed PBS News Jeffrey Brown the plans for the garden during a visit to his studio in the Netherlands.

Piet Oudolf, Landscape Designer:

If you look at this drawing, see the groups of plants, and this is one particular grass that may understood all these groups. So it feels more like a meadow.

John Yang (voice-over):

He was already a big fan of the city.

Piet Oudolf:

I was always sort of intrigued by Detroit. Found so much energy and so many people that were just the one was doing this, the other one was doing that. So you see, I felt that the whole city was vibrating.

John Yang (voice-over):

The roots of Oudolf Garden Detroit reach back to 2016 with a letter. Three members of the Michigan Garden Club asked Oudolf if he'd design a garden in Detroit, just as he had done in Chicago with the Lurie Garden and in New York with the High Line. Please, they implored him, say yes.

Maura Campbell was one of those behind the letter. For years, she led efforts to make the garden a reality. She died last year, but her husband, Duncan, was there every step of the way, including for Oudolf's first visit in 2017.

Duncan Campbell, Volunteer, Oudolf Garden Detroit:

We called it our first date. So we picked him up at the airport and we drove him all over Detroit, Southwest Detroit, the train station, the depopulated east side of Detroit. And he fell in love with Detroit.

John Yang (voice-over):

The path from a plant on paper to plants in the ground wasn't easy. In 2019, a harsh winter and heavy rain raised the Great Lakes water levels to historic highs. The Detroit River, which surrounds Belle Isle and connects with Lake Erie, flooded the planned site for the garden.

Duncan Campbell:

I came out here with a yardstick and a GPS unit, and one third of the garden was underwater. Piet was very flexible on it, but we had to go completely back to the drawing board. So we pulled it back from the shore, and we basically raised it up, and that way it insulated us from high water in the future.

John Yang (voice-over):

Then came the pandemic, delaying planting until the fall of 2020. The garden opened in August 2021, paid for entirely with private donations. There are four distinct the main garden, a rain garden, the bird border, and the meadows.

There are nearly 80,000 plants in the garden, and horticulturist Richard Thomas oversees, faithfully carrying out Oudolf vision.

Richard Thomas, Horticulturist, Oudolf Garden Detroit:

His goal is to excite an emotional response and the same kind of response that you would have if you were coming across natural beauty, a meadow that's blooming.

John Yang:

Designing the plants or choosing the plants and the colors. Is it almost like an artist figuring out what goes on the painting?

Richard Thomas:

That's really astute, because it very much is, and he's often referred to as painting with plants. And that's where his genius really shines out, because very few people can see a plant through all the seasons and add a layer of time and understand how that garden is going to look.

John Yang (voice-over):

Part time Horticulturist Alexandra Sarkozy assists Thomas.

Alexandra Sarkozy, Assistant Horticulturist, Oudolf Garden Detroit:

What consistently boggles my mind about this is just that incredible complexity of it. Planting a garden. Yeah, you want something in bloom in May, June, July. Whereas this palette changes every 10 days. It's just this constant series of moving parts.

Piet Oudolf:

That one is called Fatal Attraction. Isn't that fun? And the other one that we have is called Hula Dancer. Great name plants. And this Dahlia purpurea, which is a prairie plant and it's just finished blooming. Plus fatal Attraction, the echinacea. And then there is an accidental butterfly weed plant with Sclepius tuberosa right there.

John Yang:

You say that's accidental. What do you mean?

Piet Oudolf:

It seeded here, but its color matches the intensity of everything else that's here. And when it's all in bloom together, it's fiesta time.

John Yang:

So you leave it there. He's seated there by itself?

Piet Oudolf:

Right. So even within the script, there's room for improvising.

Woman:

I've looked at this a bunch of times it means air drops.

John Yang (voice-over):

But still, volunteers carefully check Oudolf plans to be sure the wrong things don't get weeded out.

Meredith Simpson, Volunteer, Oudolf Garden Detroit:

It's hard for even seasoned gardeners to see the plants sometimes from the weeds.

John Yang:

Meredith Simpson manages the roster of nearly 300 volunteers, keeping in mind what each has to offer.

Meredith Simpson:

We have all kinds of activities for our volunteers. Not everyone is a gardener. Some folks love to mow lawns. They're our amazing green team. We have folks that will work on pathways. Maybe they can't bend down and work in the soil. You know, we have folks absolutely who are bed captaining these amazing beds and learning every single plant in those beds. But there's everything in between as well.

John Yang (voice-over):

As the day draws to a close, volunteers gather to take a look at the results of their labors, with spot quizzes thrown in.

Piet Oudolf:

You say Culver's root. Well, then you were right.

John Yang:

Their efforts attract many of the more than 5 million annual visitors to Belle Isle.

Meredith Simpson:

To have access to nature out here, right in the city, to have this beautiful, emotional, sort of ephemeral, always changing garden, you see people simply relax and just exhale and truly enjoy. Touches you very deeply.