The city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures.

Detroit is far greener than most major cities, as seen in the runaway vines swarming old mansions in Brush Park, trees sprouting from the rooftops of skyscrapers, tall fields of grass encircling a lone house still standing on a residential block, and abandoned homes swallowed by shrubs thriving unchecked.

Whole neighborhood blocks cleared of their houses by arson and then bulldozers have reverted to urban prairies. They’re visible in satellite photos as unusually large green patches in the middle of the inner city. Sidewalks vanish beneath creeping grasses, while aluminum fences between homes become entwined with the branches of dozens of saplings growing as high as the droopy utility wires.

Alleys in parts of the city resemble hiking trails, as growth from the yards on both sides narrows their width. All around town, even smaller empty lots become thick, green fields, because the city doesn’t often mow in easements and right-of-way areas, and the weeds grow waist high.

Throughout Detroit, as half the population fled in the last half-century outward towards the suburbs and later towards more rural areas, the city itself has, ironically, become more rural, with wild animals and lush green plants coexisting with an industrial, modern metropolis. Nature, driven back by progress during the city’s 300 years, has aggressively reasserted itself in recent years, reclaiming land that people have given up on.

Animals normally scared out to the perimeter of the exurban rural areas are wandering back, sometimes finding more green space in parts of the city than they do in the increasingly developed parts of the exurbs like northern Macomb County.

As homes in residential areas became abandoned and either crumbled, burned or were demolished, whole blocks became empty in the middle of neighborhoods, and grasses, trees, wildflowers and vines have overrun the brick, wood and concrete that stood there for a century, leaving only crisscrossing streets as reminders that they were once inhabited.

It’s gotten to the point that various groups over the years have floated the ideas of turning some of the empty lots around the city into small farming plots for neighborhood residents to farm, reminiscent of Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree’s program that turned city plots into potato farms to feed the hungry in the 1890s.

Abandoned industrial sites like the Fisher Body 21 plant, the Studebaker plant, the Continental Aluminum plant and the Detroit Screw Works plant have been overrun by trees growing through walls and roofs, unaffected by the chemicals and toxins left behind.

Even downtown, abandoned skyscrapers, with windows left open to the elements, become giant pigeon coops, their upper floors covered in inches of pigeon droppings, as generation after generation of pigeons live uninterrupted by humans in the middle of a major downtown. Buildings like the Wurlitzer, the Lafer and the Broderick house hundreds of pigeons between them.

Trees up to two or three stories tall rise up from the roofs of a number of local skyscrapers, like the Metropolitan, Charlevoix and Lafayette buildings, and hotels like the Fort-Shelby, and used to rise from the Statler and Book Cadillac hotels. A bushy tree rises higher each year from the Detroit Building’s roof on Park Avenue (above).

Probably the most visible wildlife in the city are the roving packs of wild dogs in Detroit neighborhoods. Groups of four to seven dogs, each litter progressively wilder and stranger-looking than their predecessors, roam through even well-kept neighborhoods, occasionally making the news when they attack someone, usually children or mail carriers.

Feral cats don’t just thrive by stalking mice through fields of wildflower and grass; sometimes take over entire buildings downtown. The Film Exchange Building has dozens of cats swarming the first floor; some maniac had been leaving cat food for them every few days, allowing them to rapidly multiply in a filthy environment. The Blenheim Apartment building on Park Avenue similarly has its share of cats sustained by someone shoving food into a small hole under the door.

Dogs and cats aren’t the only animals roaming the city; true wildlife has made its way back into Detroit after being pushed to the edges of the suburbs years ago. Pheasants have become commonplace in areas like Brush Park and Woodbridge, along the East riverfront, and in grassy parts of Highland Park. Even foxes, opossums, turkeys, roosters and raccoons have been spotted deep inside the city, some animals even roaming downtown where very little street-level brush exists as places to hide.

Opossums occasionally are spotted wandering alongside buildings in the Central Business District. In the Detroit Building on Park, I once found raccoon tracks on floors that also contained foot-high vegetation growing in floor mush. Impressions of raccoon paws were along windowsills and the edges of doors. In the Charlevoix Building down the street, I came across a dead raccoon on an upper floor, inside a closet (seen at left).

Some wildlife doesn’t come to the city on its own. In 1987, five Peregrine falcons were released in Detroit as part of a national program to restore them to the Midwest and East Coast. They nested on the Fischer Building, the Book Building and the Whittier Apartments.

I encountered one of them on an upper-floor fire escape of the Book Building a while back. It startled me by squawking loudly at me while perched a few feet away, staring intently at me, long enough to snap a photo of it before it flew off with slow, heavy flaps of its large wings, flying towards the abandoned Fort Shelby Hotel, itself the site of a turkey vulture’s nest this year, sharing roof space with several large trees.

Probably the most famous symbol of wildlife’s reclamation of the city are the stubborn trees referred to locally as ghetto palms. Known for their ubiquity in Detroit’s alleys, empty lots and fence borders between homes, the Ailanthus altissima, also called the Tree of Heaven, was imported from China in 1784 and spread through the city like a weed. It’s a very hardy species, able to grow in very small amounts of soil, requiring little sunlight or water, and able to withstand all sorts of soil pollutants, as anyone who’s tried to rid their property of them can confirm.

Their height is a gauge of how long a particular parcel has been neglected. In some areas they reach several stories high.

The gradual greening of Detroit adds to its fascination as a place of contrasts, where century-old mansions share borders with burned-out crackhouses, where urbane lofts exist in the same city as crumbling homes in the deep neighborhoods, where unrestrained nature is intertwined with the sharp lines and angles of the cement and steel of factories, where blocks of skyscrapers stand only a mile away from grassy expanses and wildflower-filled meadows whose small flowers bloom as colorful as any up north.

Also see: Wild neighborhoods