Saline — Changming Fan calls the coming weeks the “glorious season,” the time of year when his garden bursts into life.
Each day will bring a new color, like a painter adding dashes of blue and yellow to canvas. Among them are irises, peonies, roses, mayapples and Chinese forget-me-nots.
But there will be no glory this year. After 13 years, Fan lost most of his garden after a dispute with his apartment complex.
It’s the latest blow in a life full of them.
Fan, 75, whose father was a rickshaw puller in China, defied all odds to become a U.S. entrepreneur who received a patent related to auto gears, only to lose everything when that and other inventions fell through.
The garden at Mill Pond Manor in Saline was his solace, his masterpiece.
Now he will watch it slowly die.
“Now it’s kind of a beautiful place,” Fan said. “How could people in a normal way want to get rid of it?”
A ‘really strange animal’ finds his way to the garden
Fan is a wisp of a man but full of energy.
He has little time for bingo, knitting and aerobics at Mill Pond, a subsidized senior apartment complex.
He’s too busy getting involved in civic affairs and trying to turn around his struggling lighting business. He becomes so subsumed by projects that he sometimes forgets to eat.
Fan said he’s a workaholic who never had time for a wife or kids. His only family is back in China.
“My retirement is working,” he said. “Life will be miserable — boring — if I don’t have something challenging. I’m a really strange animal.”
Fan’s age and a recent stroke have slowed him down, but only a little.
Vin Pinti, a law student at the University of Michigan who helped Fan try to keep his garden, said he was constantly surprised by Fan’s resilience during the fight.
“He’s persistent,” Pinti said. “Although he was dealt an unfortunate hand, he still plays the game. He hasn’t checked out. Despite the eviction threat, he continues to garden.”
Fan’s intensity is softened by a guilelessness, a nearly childlike openness. If there’s any artifice about him, it’s hard to detect.
Born in communism, Fan struggled in capitalism
An earthquake propelled Fan halfway across the world.
He was a bricklayer-turned-builder whose work on the destruction from a 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China, prompted the government to pay for higher education. He was the first in his family of 11 to attend college.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Tianjin University in China, he finished among the top students in an intense competition for overseas study. As a teen, he taught himself English by listening to the Voice of America.
“I’m fascinated with the Western world,” he said. “I believe in capitalism more than communism. Capitalism has genes to keep growing. Makes sense, right?”
Fan received a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Michigan and worked as a project engineer for Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. for seven years in the 1990s. At GM, he received a patent for inventing a part of the gear system that allowed the support pin and surrounding structures to move in sync.
He also invented a hybrid pump that merged piston and turbine technology and a light that changes the color of water in a fountain from the inside. But neither received patents.
Fan took a training program for entrepreneurs and started his own company, TiniLite World, in 1996. It made lighting accessories like Christmas lights that, instead of incandescent bulbs, used LED ones.
He bought a Cape Cod-style home in Saline and filled the yard with things he built: a luscious garden, swimming pool and 33-foot gazebo.
In the 1990s, however, LED lights were too expensive for the marketplace and wouldn’t become more common until 20 years later. Fan was ahead of his time.
TiniLite struggled to make money and eventually lost its investors.
“My whole point is invent things, not be distracted,” he said. “Inventors are most stubborn. They prefer to be poor.”
During the housing crisis in 2008, Fan lost his home, swimming pool, gazebo and garden. He said he lived out of his car for 2 ½ years.
He lives on food stamps and $1,027 a month in Social Security. He struggles to pay insurance for a 2002 Grand Am that barely runs. He owes $50,000 in school loans.
He had hoped for a better life in America.
“I get depressed thinking about it, at my age, screaming and yelling,” Fan said. “I’m so dedicated to innovation. I have to fight for every inch. I don’t say I’m famous or genius, but I’m poorly treated for making good things.”
A compulsive personality finds peace in plants
Fan began planning his garden even before he moved into Mill Pond Manor.
He was on a years-long waiting list when he told the manager his first act as a resident would be to remove all the poison ivy behind the facility.
He said he had no idea how big an undertaking the garden would be, but his compulsive personality said otherwise.
Fan began digging shortly after becoming a tenant in 2013 and never stopped, said residents. He’s in the garden at all times of the day and sometimes all day long.
July heat waves and December cold spells don’t stop him. Residents said they’ve seen him watering the garden during a rainfall because he felt the plants needed more hydration.
Lee Johnson, a Saline resident who works next to Mill Pond, said Fan seems to be in the garden every time she drives past the facility.
“He’s always out there, him or his walker,” Johnson said. “I see his walker and wonder, ‘What is he up to now?’”
Fan, who is 5-foot-4 and 127 pounds, has hurt himself several times while gardening. In 2017, he was hospitalized after fracturing his back trying to move a boulder half his size.
At age 75, he climbs into trees to cut branches that are damaged or diseased.
Fan began with a small plot but expanded it. He then expanded it again. And again. And again. It now runs 70 yards along a woods behind the apartment complex before taking a turn and stopping just short of the street.
He filled those 70 yards with all manner of flowers, plants, shrubs and saplings. They’re joined by urns, gnomes, windmills, birdbaths and birdhouses and a glass-enclosed Buddha head.
The inventor had become the gardener.
“Everyone knows I’m the gardener of the neighborhood,” Fan said. “I’m going to do the right thing whether you threaten me or not. This is my legacy.”
Some of the flora and decorations were donated. The provenance of the rest is unclear.
Fan said the garden is his therapy. It helps soothe his feelings when he can’t sleep. It makes him feel good.
It isn’t just a hobby, he said. It’s spiritual.
“If I’m really unhappy, feel sometimes so down and so depressed, I take care of flowers,” he said.
Apartment owner labels the garden ‘malicious destruction of property’
Where Fan saw a garden, his landlord saw “malicious destruction of property.”
That’s the phrase Mill Pond’s lawyer, James Martone, used in July 2025 when he wrote to Fan to say he was being evicted.
The notice to quit cited several reasons: expanding the garden without permission, having an unsanitary apartment and hitting the manager with his backpack.
Fan denied striking the worker during the 2024 argument, which he said was caused by a dispute over an increase in rent.
Earlier managers looked the other way during the expansion of Fan’s garden, but a new supervisor, who arrived several years ago, was less forgiving.
Fan ignored the manager’s entreaties to stop watering the foliage, continuing to do so when he wasn’t around — weekends, early mornings and late nights. He hurt himself several times falling in the dark.
The facility finally turned off the water to an outside faucet, so Fan began using one on the other side of the building. When that water was cut off as well, he began filling several buckets with water, putting them on his wheelchair and taking the elevator from the third floor.
After seven warnings, Mill Pond issued the eviction notice.
A spokesperson for the facility declined to discuss the matter.
“I will tell you Mr. Fan is not being asked to give up his garden,” said the spokesperson, Chris Ragon. “He is being asked to reduce his garden to its original size so other residents can have gardens, too.”
Some apartment residents aren’t crazy about their unofficial gardener.
Jane Dillard said she stopped talking with Fan because he’s argumentative. She calls him the “belligerent man in the forest.”
“The garden kept going and going. He wouldn’t stop,” Dillard said. “You can’t stop him. He won’t stop.”
She criticized the way Fan gardens. Residents were having a potluck in 2024 when Fan, covered with dirt from head to toe, walked into the complex’s kitchen, she said.
Fan pleaded guilty to the charge of scruffiness. He said there’s nothing dainty about gardening, that Chinese gardeners like to become enmeshed with the soil.
Deal struck to pare back Fan’s garden, keep apartment
Fan fought the eviction through a UM law school clinic where students represent people who can’t afford an attorney.
In December, the UM Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic worked out a deal in Washtenaw County District Court that allowed Fan to keep his apartment and original garden, which is 15 yards long.
In return, he agreed to stop tending the rest of the vegetation by April 15. Mill Pond recently installed surveillance cameras around the property, according to residents.
The law students who represented Fan said there was little they could do legally to save the rest of his garden. But they didn’t give up.
They moved their quest to save the garden from the courtroom to the public sphere. They mounted a campaign for people to contact local and state politicians and executives at the Retirement Housing Foundation, a Long Beach, Calif.-based nonprofit that manages the facility.
A petition on Change.org received 1,264 signatures. It said the garden elicited joy, solace and serenity. That’s all gone, the petition said.
Pinti, the UM law student, said he was drawn to Fan’s plight because he found the Chinese immigrant inspiring.
“He had so many reasons to give up, but he doesn’t,” he said. “The first thing he wants to do in the morning is get up and go into the garden.”
Despite the students’ efforts, Mill Pond wouldn’t budge. Fan needs to refrain from working in the rest of the garden after April 15, the landlord said.
Chinese immigrant watches creation die on the vine
Fan said it’s difficult to keep his promise to abandon his other plants.
Just two weeks after the April 15 deadline, the difference between Fan’s plot and the rest of the garden is already pronounced. His spot is a dense, colorful mix of perennials versus the patchiness of its neighbor.
Fan is especially worried about his red cedar saplings. He transplanted 35 of them from the nearby woods. He loves the cedars because they can grow 300 feet high and live for 500 years. But they need lots of watering when young.
“Trees are part of my life,” he said. “Every time I think of trees, I’m happy. That’s who I am.”
If Mill Pond’s landlord checks the footage from its surveillance cameras from the past week, it will spy a small, slumping man trudging through the dark. He nearly stumbled as he pushed a wheelchair along the hillside garden.
He reached into the wheelchair and pulled out a bucket of water. Clutching the heavy pail, he walked gingerly to one of the baby cedars and quenched its thirst.
It will be too dark to see the man’s face, but he’ll be smiling.
fdonnelly@detroitnews.com
(313) 223-4176
@prima_donnelly
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Saline landlord prunes elderly Chinese immigrant’s garden
Reporting by Francis X. Donnelly, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
