Overview:

- Loretta Powell's family moved to Detroit in May 1967, two months before the city's uprising.
- Her father worked in the auto industry, grew vegetables, and taught Powell how to garden.
- Powell's Little Detroit Community Garden has now celebrated four harvests on Montclair Street near East Warren Avenue.

At the corner of Montclair Street and Warren Avenue, on the city’s east side, Little Detroit Community Garden is an eye catcher.

A vibrant mural wraps around a raised garden shed, depicting larger-than-life fruits and vegetables, buzzing bees, and butterflies, beckoning all who pass by to take a look. If it’s a Saturday, you’re likely to find Loretta Powell, the homeowner who lives next door, working in the garden. The preschool teacher is the founder of this neighborhood shared space. 

The Little Detroit Community Garden is named for Powell’s mother, Little Henretter Puryear. In creating the outdoor education space, Powell combined a lifelong love of caring for the land and nourishing people. She says her experience gardening came at a very early age — a special relationship with the land that has been passed down for generations.

A community garden’s beginnings

In 2020, after being laid off from her job with Detroit Community Public School District due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell said she connected with Eastside Community Network, which had leftover grant funds to develop public garden projects. 

She dreamed of beautifying the neighborhood. Like many Detroiters, Powell, her family, and neighbors maintained public areas beyond their own property, mowing lots, cutting overgrown shrubs, and clearing trash when people littered. She says they received the least support during the city’s bankruptcy and emergency manager years.  

“We held it up for 30 years,” Powell said with a sigh. “Everyone just abandoned the eastside.”

This time Powell wanted more than a clean lot. She wanted to bring neighbors together and build community with a garden where native plants could flourish and children could learn to cultivate flowers, fruits, and vegetables while nurturing and protecting the earth. 

Now, Little Detroit Community Garden hosts native Michigan plants that attract butterflies, bees, and birds, turning the space into a rich urban pollinator sanctuary.

Powell is proud of the gazebo she and her volunteers built last year; it hosts block club meetings, barbecues, and even prom send-offs. It’s proof the garden has become a neighborhood gathering place.

At the garden’s entrance, there’s a picture of Luther Keith, a beloved Detroit community leader. Keith worked as a journalist and editor at The Detroit News for more than 30 years, and the founder and executive director of Arise Detroit!, a nonprofit coalition that mobilizes volunteers and neighborhood groups to promote community improvement across the city. Keith died March 5, 2025. 

The sign at Little Detroit Community Garden. Photo by Carissa Welton for Planet Detroit.

Keith, a mentor and friend to Powell, helped her organize the annual Neighborhood Day event for the Little Detroit Community Garden in August 2021. 

“[Keith] was instrumental in helping me to realize this project,” said Powell, who is still grieving his death from earlier this year. 

Powell learns farming skills in Detroit

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Powell and her family were part of the Great Migration, a mass movement of millions of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North and West between 1916 and 1970, seeking better economic opportunities and refuge from brutal Jim Crow persecution.

Powell’s father, John Puryear, journeyed north first, seeking work and building a foundation so the rest of the family could follow. “My dad saved up for two years working at General Motors before he was finally able to bring us all up here,” Powell said. Her father worked in the auto industry, grew vegetables, and taught Powell how to garden.

“He bought a big back lot [behind our house], and we had vegetables on that one,” Powell recalled. “We had a peach tree. We had collard greens, corn, green beans, and all different types of vegetables.” 

Along with meat from the butcher in Eastern Market, the family garden provided healthy meals for their household of nine. “So when I became a farmer, I was just so excited to keep that legacy alive, keep it going. You know, growing fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Powell is a certified USDA farmer and member of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. 

Powell was 6 when her family — her parents and six siblings — moved to Detroit’s east side in May 1967, two months before the city’s Civil Rights-era uprising. 

Powell remembers seeing armed guards stationed at the end of her street and at the fire station. She recounts the instability she sensed around her as a child, describing the period as “a trauma we had to go through.” 

She also has fond memories of her neighborhood lined with homes full of families and other children to play with. There was an ice cream shop on the corner and a bowling alley down the street. 

“You didn’t even have to go out of the community,” Powell said, “because everything was right here.”  

She says she has always lived within a 1-mile radius of her family home on French Road. Powell has a brother who still lives there today. 

Powell met her husband, James, in the early 1980s. They married in 1991 and moved into his parents’ home on Montclair Street, where they raised three children and where she still lives today.

‘The community is becoming stronger’

To date, Little Detroit Community Garden has celebrated four harvest seasons, garnering support from several community partners.

Powell is busy developing two other lots around her home: a gazebo garden to the north, offering a space for people to gather in the shade around a table, and the beginning of an exercise garden across the street to the east. Both areas are taking shape and depend on volunteer labor. 

The beginning of an orchard, with two apple trees planted two years ago, should bear fruit by summer 2026.

The Little Detroit Community Garden’s partner organizations and volunteers are key to its success.

Danny Dolley, who was introduced to Powell through the Eastside Community Network, assisted Powell with writing the initial grant that transformed the city lot into the community space it is today. 

Little Detroit Community Garden provides food security, native plant education, an annual summer block party and volunteer opportunities all year long in the East Canfield neighborhood. 

“I’m glad I can see [our neighborhood] coming back; the community is becoming stronger. People are loving where they live. And I get so many compliments on what we have accomplished,” Powell said.

Read more from Planet Detroit’s Neighborhood Reporting Lab

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