John Hantz, Detroit's Johnny Appleseed, continues to expand his project to reforest a square miles of the city's abandoned landscape, Laura Berman writes.
This week, 150 mature trees — 20 feet high, trucked to Detroit from as far away as Buffalo, N.Y. — are being planted at Van Dyke and Goethe on vacant lots. They add heft and height to John Hantz's big idea: That reclaiming land for agriculture or trees will help restore pride and beauty to an area that's been demoralized by abandonment.
Over five years, that idea has taken official root in a mile-square area as Hantz Woodlands. On Monday, it appeared in the form of big trees with giant root balls, representing an investment of about $100,000 to demonstrate what the rest of the area will look like a decade from now.
This week's big trees are a fitting autumn cap to last spring's event, when volunteers converged to drop 15,000 oak and maple saplings into lots that had been previously cleared and mowed.
