Detroit Garden Works | Deborah Silver & Co.

Thirty Years

It was 30 years ago last night that Rob and I were hosting an opening preview celebration for Deborah Silver and Company’s new venture – Detroit Garden Works. This brand new company would make fine, whimsical, intriguing, memorable and shockingly beautiful ornament for the garden available to keen gardeners of all persuasions. Ha. It was a good thing we had ideas and determination, as it would take all of that and then some to make this wish come true. By “then some”, I mean the 10 years after the opening that it took to get the shop centered, fully off the ground, and firmly in the black. We fought for it. Sincerely.

My landscape design/build firm, Deborah Silver and Company, opened for business in 1986, a decade earlier. Though the vast majority of my landscape design work revolved around the instinct to sculpt ground and install beautifully designed landscapes and gardens to life on the surfaces of that sculpted ground, I felt like a certain element was missing. An interest in art and sculpture meant I had an interest in ornament for the garden. What do I mean by that? Any object which represents a significant memory or a point of view about what is beautiful or emotionally important can imbue a landscape with atmosphere. A landscape with atmosphere is all I have ever hoped to make. Though I was keen to include this ornamental layer in my landscape design and installation projects, precious little was available.

Rob joined the landscape company in 1992, after completing his degree in landscape architecture at Michigan State University. It became clear early on that his landscape design work was austere, complex, yet casually offhand. Years later, he knows how to make a subtle and gracefully constructed arrangement look as if he dashed it off in a moment. No matter how long he labors over and reworks anything he does, it will be perfectly convincing. He is a proponent and champion of a sparse look that always hovers just over and on the right side of weedy. That early mix of modernism and mess confounded me, and drove me crazy. No design project of his ever came to a definitive close. Clients wanting direction that had parameters in mind got his tinkering with no boundaries. How did we resolve those early years, co-designing ? He had a romance going on with the garden like no other person I had ever met. I reserved judgment. This is one of the better decisions I have ever made. I truly admired his point of view. A commitment to that took me a long way. The idea that we would open a shop devoted to fine quality ornament for the garden was an idea we came to share. That he would do all of the buying for the store is that one decision that keeps us here 30 years later.

In the fall of 1992, Rob had a winter trip planned to Czechoslovakia to ski. I financed a side trip, a very casually weedy trip, to scout European ornament that might be of interest to us, and to our clients. 2 pallets representing the sum total of his shopping arrived months later. It was exhilarating. We knew the right collection of pots or sculpture could organize a landscape. An antique garden ornament saturates the immediate environment with a sense of another time and place – history. Vintage farm troughs recall that time when agriculture was so much a part of every life. Vintage ornament of an agricultural history satisfies that longing for connection to nature. Contemporary sculpture in the garden can evoke an appreciation of form, mass, and texture in a very direct and abstracted way. I wanted the perfect bench, the most striking container, and topiary forms that would work while they were being beautiful-for my landscapes. I knew that Rob would take this on.

Now, Rob buys for Detroit Garden Works. He attends the flea markets, fairs and factories. He has relationships with garden antique dealers, both in the US and abroad. He makes a point of visiting nurseries and specialty growers everywhere he goes. He makes it a point to meet the people who make things for gardens. He gives them the time and space to speak to their craft. What eventually makes its way to Detroit Garden Works in the spring of each year is a very carefully curated collection that has been assembled with a discerning eye.

His shopping is always about the stories of the people. The antiques dealers with a long history of collecting. The person who carves words into the oak boards that comprise her garden furniture pieces. The people whose pottery is still making pots going on two hundred years later. The artisan who is creating their own special brand of ornament. The dealer who has taken the time to make very fine quality reproductions of classic garden ornament. The armillary sphere maker whose attention to the science, physics, and fabrication warrants a closer look. I greatly admire how he takes the buying to heart. That big heart of his has made Detroit Garden Works a destination for gardeners of every persuasion.

Detroit Garden Works is in the business of offering beautiful ornament for the garden. Still. It could be antique. It could be vintage, and funky vintage. It could be of a French, American or Italian flavor. It could be of English origin, through and through. It could be new, with a particular point of view. It could be fun or funny. It could be contemporary. It could be arts and crafts or mid century modern inspired. It could be Belgian in origin-old, vintage, or new. It could be none of the above, just sitting here waiting for that one particular gardening client to lay claim to it. When you come here, you’ll see.

Posted on: March 30, 2026 45 Comments

Filed Under: Detroit Garden Works, Garden Ornament, Parties and Events, garden sculpture, the garden Tagged With: gardening, Detroit Garden Works, Garden Furniture, Garden Design, Garden Ornament, pergolas and arbors

The Winter/Holiday Season at Detroit Garden Works

After an intensely re-imagined and heartfelt few weeks, all of the materials new and old we have available for winter and holiday expressions have been unboxed and put on display at the shop. Heartfelt? We work our collective hearts out to provide our clients with materials that recall, honor and celebrate the garden at year’s end. All 9600 square feet of it is stuffed to bursting with the beautiful, the whimsical, the traditional, the unusual – the satisfying and joyous signs of the winter and holiday gardening season on the way.

It was probably better than 25 years ago that Rob and I started shopping, collecting, and offering for sale materials suitable for winter arrangements for pots and containers. All of these materials – whether an astonishingly convincing replica of the real plant or flower, a collection of various fresh cut twigs and greens, or innovative lighting – have the potential to keep the hope and memory of the garden alive during our long winter season. What we have available in the shop today is as good as our experience and and will to celebrate gardening can provide. You’ll see.

Up next is a pictorial version of the shop, dressed, decked out, and ready for the season. If you are too far to make the trip, we want to share what we have the best we can. If you are close enough, we invite you to come and see what’s doing in person.

What could possibly be more forlorn and pathetic to a gardener than empty garden pots, or a landscape gone dark and dreary at year’s end?Finding a reason to celebrate seems like a much better idea. We intend to provide the chance to help keep the gardening season open and thriving all year round, in spite of the untoward winter weather and dark. If you see anything here that interests or intrigues you enough to inquire further, we are available.

1 248 335 8089

webinquiry@detroitgardenworks.com

Posted on: November 13, 2025 26 Comments

Filed Under: Detroit Garden Works, Holiday, Winter, seasonal plants, Seasonal Tagged With: winter and holiday lighting, Detroit Garden Works, holiday pots, winter gardens, winter landscape, winter containers and pots

At A Glance: The Lighted Rings

To follow is a visual collection of light rings which we have placed in winter containers over the past 15 years or so. This first picture is a detail of the last. The last picture features our current display of them at the shop. I am very pleased that adding strings of twig garland lights proved to be transformative. We will go on making them – in one form or another.

lighted ring lined with fir

five foot ring with red twig dogwood

galvanized snowflakes and snowball picks

Jackie Classic style steel box and light ring both fabricated at The Branch Studio

curly willow on either side of a ring

2′ and 3′ diameter light rings featuring cherry light strings and galvanized steel holly and berry garlands. The 5′ ring in the foreground is lighted with a Lumineo compact light set.

light ring in a thicket

2011

dried plants from the garden. The bright light in the foreground is a string of C7 incandescent lights piled up.

five foot ring lined with a boxwood garland

crisp and contemporary

alder branches

holiday

beaming in the rose arbor

cornus “Midwinter Fire” branches, magnolia branches and fir

alder branches and faux berry picks

white tipped green pinecone garlands and fir added to the rings

a client’s breathaking winter container featuring a five foot light ring

light ring wreathed in fir garland with a trio of steel pine cones

This three foot ring is additionally lighted with 2 strands of twig garland lights

Detroit Garden Works winter 2025

Posted on: January 27, 2025 20 Comments

Filed Under: Picture This, Detroit Garden Works, Garden Ornament, Lighting, Winter, Deborah Silver and Co Inc Tagged With: lighted circles, lighted steel rings in containers, lighted steel rings, Detroit Garden Works, holiday lighting, winter lighting, light rings, lighted rings

Taking the Next Step

It was not my intent to give the impression that the time it took to write my previous post was in any way comparable to the time it took to light up that first vintage steel hoop and end up manufacturing steel light rings. In face I want to discourage that interpretation. That post was written well after the fact and in a matter of hours. The evolution of that glimmer of an idea to light up a vintage tractor wheel and hang it in a tree to shipping light rings all over the US – that took years. It takes loads of time to move off one’s own familiar dime in search of a new way of seeing – or being. Doesn’t it?

It was many years ago that we moved up to making light rings with multi colored light strands. White mini lights were not the only game in town, right? The hoops were fashioned from channel steel the width of which snugly held the incandescent light strings in place. The wrapping of the lights was a very formal and serious affair. Once Rob leapt off the usual and familiar, he abandoned the incandescent light strings for LED’s. The price had come down, and the expense to power them up was dramatically less. That was a crucially important step, but it meant that the hoops had to be redesigned. The ring is wider and the channel is deeper now. The best news of all of that transformation is the cost of running the lights around the clock, and close to all year long, was very reasonable. The interest in the hoops grew.

I recall a fling with LED cherry light strands. Rob does make lots of winter/holiday lighting available to customers of Detroit Garden Works. The cherry lights are just one style of many we have had available to use. We took to those cherry lights-meaning we wrapped light rings with them. The fascination with those luminous sphere lights goes on – as well it should. I also remember a brief bead we had on various mixes of lights large and small. We were hooping it up. Years later, a five foot ring belonging to an adventuresome client now has lighted ornament hanging in that big empty space inside the ring. Hung from an arbor at the far end of her driveway, it lights the way as much as it says welcome home and Merry Christmas. The winter lights have a sculptural intent, but they also shoo away the dark.

Rob stepped up to a version of the hanging light hoop that featured four rod steel legs. The new free standing rings could be placed in pots, or directly into the soil in the landscape. This step forward was liberating. One year a five foot light ring strung with our LED mini lights was wreathed in large galvanized snow flakes – zip tied on to the steel circle – one 3-D flake at a time. I don’t remember how that idea came to be, but it was smashing. Months ago, a client with existing light rings was looking for a fresh iteration. I was fussing a little and fuming plenty about what to do with them – not seeing a clear way forward. It finally occurred to me that her lighted rings could be armatures or structures. Those rings could be the supporting cast. A foundation upon which another independent element could be added.

I found a direction worth pursuing. Pairing a light ring with a 6′ long lighted twig garland proved to be just the thing for taking a sculptural step. This light garland is very different than a typical light strand featuring all of the lights in an evenly spaced row. Once the garland is fluffed out, it added volume to the ring without weighing it down. The sturdily wired and lit branchlets enabled placing them both to the inside and to the outside of the ring. We featured this pairing this past week in the winter containers in the front of the shop. The long wired arms make the lights appear to be floating around the ring. Handsome, this.

Once all of our winter work for clients is done, we dress the front of the shop. This is a project we greatly enjoy, as it signals that all of our booked work is finished. The pace slows down. We take that time to sort out how we want to proceed, as we can. The centerpiece of this garden is a large and substantial cast iron vat. Five cases of noble fir from an alternate supplier sitting untouched in a corner proved to be the largest and longest fir boughs of the entire season. We had no idea that these boxes held such evergreen gold. That robust scale and length was just what this light ring and vat needed to make a winter container where every element is of proper proportion to the size of the space and the container.

The windowsills inside my office are deep. I would say a foot or better. I have long toyed with the idea of making that interior sill space part of the exterior winter display-and vice versa. There is no reason not to. The glass is not a barrier to seeing. We loaded small galvanized rectangles with dry foam and lights, and 4 rows of pussy willow, set them close to the glass.

Those closely spaced sticks provided a simple yet uniformly textured background to the rings. It afforded the vignette some depth. They helped to define the space. They look good!

Making the view of the inside an integral part of the outside also provided privacy from the inside out. Every step we took with this project was a step in a direction I liked.

Filling the 2 planter boxes on either side of the front door solidly with bunches of pussy willow completed the look.