We Are Making Bee City Beautiful!

Detroit is an official Bee City, and the newly-formed Busy Bees have the will and the skill to transform small blighted areas of Morningside into BEE-YOU-TEA-FULL pollinator zones that please the eye and discourage criminal activity. Our goal is to make each space low-maintenance and beautiful, serving both pollinators and people, by taking invasive plants out and putting native plants in.

Vacant lots and even street berms have a lot of potential. If you do it right, you can create a great support system for pollinators.

Many studies prove that attractively landscaped areas such as gardens and pocket parks increase happiness and reduce the anxiety, hopelessness, and crime that blighted vacant lots promote. A neighbor told me recently, “I love what you’re doing! The other night when I was really stressed, I saw the lanterns and sat in your garden and felt much better. It was exactly what I needed.”

Morningside’s 1 Vice President Twiana Odom and I are currently very focused on the Cornwall Corridor between Barham and Somerset, as well as the Art and Soul Garden on Somerset at E. Warren. Twiana’s family owns it and is developing it into a community space where people can showcase their arts. We’re also working on the apple orchards on Cornwall and on Somerset to make them more “garden-y” by layering on woodchips and planting clover.

We need volunteers to join our Busy Bee colony, as well as useful donations such as additional landscaping tools: lawn mowers, blowers, wheelbarrows, shovels, hand shovels, weed whips, paper leaf bags, solar lights, perennial pollinator-friendly plants, seeds, trees, and shrubs.

We encourage you to join Busy Bees and submit cleanup projects for the colony to take on. Contact me at charon.nogues.rad.estate@gmail.com. You could BEE the change.