Nature Calls

By Tim Smith | Photos by Bryan Mitchell

A“beautification revolution” seems to be taking root – literally – throughout Plymouth, with picturesque butterfly gardens sprouting around town thanks to nature-loving Dave and Carly Cirilli.

All the Plymouth couple needs to work their makeover magic is a weedy parcel in need of transformation. On the banks of the Rouge River, across from the Plymouth Lions Club Park, is a must-see butterfly garden now beginning to catch the eye of pedestrians and motorists alike.

The project is the latest and greatest for a fledgling volunteer organization the Cirilli’s are spearheading, the Plymouth Pollinators (of which there is an active Facebook group page).

“This garden (at the northeast corner of Burroughs and Harding) is probably one of my favorites to come to because we get a lot of foot traffic here, a lot of the residents stop and chat with us,” Carly Cirilli said. “The feedback we’ve been getting is great, they just love it.

“Especially last year with the pandemic it was kind of this, a highlight, something good that was happening.”

Chiming in was her husband, Dave Cirilli, who is a water technician for the Plymouth Department of Municipal Services.

“It’s one of those things where you drive by and it catches your eye,” he said. “She’s more of the gardener, but they’d be asking me ‘What’s this plant?’ I’d come up with my own names. I’m kind of the worker bee, I guess.”

To help during such awkward situations, the couple has installed an information box. Inquisitive people can reach in to pull out a brochure or pamphlet with plenty of important facts about what they might be looking at.

“It’s information for those interested in starting their own pollinator garden,” Carly continued. “There’s quick tips, (about) what plants to buy, what host plants to get for butterflies. There’s also a brochure about if you want to create a monarch way station, just monarch conservation.”

Monarchs are the bright orange and black male pollinator butterflies which bounce around from plant to plant, snatching pollen along the way.

“That’s a male monarch,” Carly explained, pointing to a butterfly on a late June evening. “The females, they go around, lay eggs on milkweed plants, that’s the only plant that monarchs will eat.”

Also eating it up are area residents and nature lovers who can’t help but crane their necks while taking a peek at the colorful pollinator garden. As long as 20year gardener Carly Cirilli is in the vicinity, they should get their questions answered.

“We have been trying to incorporate some native plants in here,” she said. “We also have some non-natives. This is a pollinator garden, so we have… post plants for certain butterflies that they eat when they’re caterpillars -- like swamp weed, the light pink flowers over there.

“And orange butterfly weed over here. We have nectar plants for the pollinators to eat, for the bees (there is) bee balm in here, some lavender. We also have some parsley and fennel for swallowtail butterflies. That’s their host plant. They lay their eggs on there and that’s what they eat. We come in here a lot and check for caterpillars and any kind of butterfly activity.”

Things might be buzzing for the rest of summer, but the garden (located east of S. Main Street and south of Ann Arbor Trail) had very humble beginnings.

A street corner with nothing but weeds and grass called out for some attention.

It helped that Dave Cirilli and municipal department colleagues Chris Helinski, Nick Johns and Aaron Micek already were tuned in to the untapped potential – having previously installed similar gardens in the city.

“It started with a little landscaping over on Main Street and Church, one of the islands, and it went really well,” Dave explained. “So we moved to another place, across from Saxton’s in Kellogg Park, it was always weedy and never nice. When we decided to do something, we decided ‘let’s do a pollinating garden.’

“So we started with that little triangle as our very first pollinating garden. After that, a few of us got the bug to do other ones.”

Johns discovered the area across Lions Club Park that now is such a conservation saver and conversation starter.

Having found a place to beautify, in spring of 2020, Johns and the other municipal workers removed weeds, brought in several boulders and sprinkled handfuls of wildflower seeds. They hoped for the best and got so much more.

“We’re learning as we go along on some of these things.” Dave said. “This whole area last year we had wildflower seeds we put down. I put down some, then Nick put down some, Chris…we went ‘Oh wow, it turned out nice!’”

But what people see these days has more to do with the help of volunteers and residents who donated portions of their own household gardens.

To spark new life out of the year-old garden, Carly and Dave also made plenty of trips to area greenhouses (Barson’s in Westland, Willow’s in Northville) and paid for the foliage and flowers out of their own pocket.

“People would come up to us and say ‘Hey, do you want some free flowers? I’m cleaning out my garden,’” noted Dave. “So we’d drive to their house, pick up flowers and bring them back.”

Such dedication to Plymouth’s beautification cause from Dave and Carly Cirilli and others is nothing new, however. About five years ago, Carly noticed there were fewer butterflies coming into the couple’s household garden.

“So I started doing some research and saw there’s such a huge decline in pollinators, specifically monarch butterflies,” Carly stressed. “There’s about an 80-percent decline in Monarchs. My husband built me a bunch of raised beds and we put all kinds of pollinator plants in there. That’s kind of where we started with it.”

The Cirilli’s also give freely of their own time and energy to help unleash some of Plymouth’s natural beauty.

After all, both have day jobs. In addition to Dave’s position with the City of Plymouth, Carly is director of business, intelligence and data analytics with Wayne State University in Detroit.

Carly doesn’t mind whatever time she spends weeding or doing other beautification tasks, noting that gardening gives her “a little bit of recreative outlet” from her analytical career.

“We come out here and work on it quite a bit,” Carly said. “I don’t personally consider it work because I love to garden. Of course, last year, with the pandemic, what else were we going to do?

“It’s just fun to come out here. Every time you come it’s something different. There’s a new flower that’s blooming or there’s new activity. It doesn’t feel so much like work.”

—Carly Cirilli, discussing the butterfly gardens the Plymouth Pollinators maintain

And the hope is that plenty of like-minded people will want to get involved with Plymouth Pollinators and perhaps plant the seeds for further projects.

“We are trying to figure out where we want to go next with this,” Carly added. “We didn’t know what was going to happen or if it was going to take off. Do we want to do a non-profit and keep things moving? We’re just letting it evolve.

“I would love to grow the Facebook group page (Plymouth Pollinators), just getting other folks that are interested in gardening in general, people who are interested in saving the pollinators. It’s nice to get all these folks together to share tips and tricks and just pictures of gardens. Something positive to focus on.”

Community-minded efforts could branch out from there, possibly extending to Plymouth Township.

“There’s a couple other nonprofit (organizations) that we’re starting to talk to that we’d like to do other projects with, like Friends of the Rouge and Keep Plymouth Leafy,” Dave said. “They do a lot of the trees around town. It would be nice to collaborate with them on some of our other parks that need some attention.”

That fact alone is enough to spur the Cirillis and others to action developing pollinator gardens such as the one at Burroughs and Harding streets.

“It’s about conservation, the pollinator population is declining,” she emphasized. “It’s the best of both worlds, doing something for the environment and something that people can enjoy. I think you’d be hardpressed to find somebody that doesn’t enjoy a garden.”

For more information about Plymouth Pollinators, send an email to Dave and Carly Cirilli at plymouthpollinators@gmail.com. Also check out their Facebook page.