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Vienna resident Claudia Bonin said she is so disheartened by proposed changes to county rules governing community garden plots that she has been tending to her garden less often. She used to walk to her Nottoway Park plot almost daily, but she and others now fear they will lose their plots at the end of the season."It's hard to want to be there when they're going to confiscate your plot," she said.
If the Park Authority's proposed new rules for the county's 700 community gardens go into effect, Bonin's white picket fence, trellis and grape vines will have to go. If she does not comply, she could lose her plot, which she has had for about six years.
The majority of the rule revisions are clarifications of existing regulations, according to Park Authority spokeswoman Judy Pedersen, and the changes were based on a 2007 survey of community garden users.
"In some ways, we didn't always apply the existing rules," Pedersen said.
The three changes that most concern gardeners are – a fence height limit of 4 feet, a prohibition on treated wood and expansion of the existing ban on trees to include shrubs, roses and other woody perennials. The Park Authority is still collecting feedback on the rules and will not enforce any changes until March 2009.
"There are better ways to do things now," Pedersen said. "We're smarter about what we're doing to the Earth and we want that reflected in our gardens."
A 4-foot fence is too low to keep out deer, gardeners say, and the bans on treated wood and perennials will put many existing gardens out of compliance. A walk through community gardens at Nottoway and at Baron Cameron Park in Reston reveals that the majority of plots contain some wood in the form of fence posts, raised beds and trellises.
"All those things we love so much are going to get ripped out," said Neil Singer, who got married at Hunter House in 2004 because he and his wife love Nottoway Park, particularly the gardens. After four years on the waiting list, the couple got a garden plot this year.
Singer views the new rules as "classic bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy" that will "dumb down" the gardens because gardeners will no longer want to invest money and effort in creating beautiful settings and build on them year to year.
Both he and Bonin say that after years of ignored complaints to staff about problems with the gardens, such as weedy unused lots, the garden community has become self-enforcing, governed by common courtesy.
Pedersen said that such complaints led park staff to generate rules.
Gardeners are particularly upset about the way the rules changes were introduced, which made it seem like there was no recourse. They are asking Park Authority officials for a seat at the table in the revision process. Bonin has also started collecting petition signatures from her fellow Nottoway gardeners.
Pedersen said that once the comment period is over and comments are compiled, likely in late August, parks staff will form a committee including gardeners to revise the rules. The final rules will be distributed in October, she said.
Parks officials are also working to reassign inactive garden plots and to clear some of the 350-person waiting list for plots, Pedersen said.
If there is a rules crackdown in the gardens, Singer predicts that it will just result in a lot of wasted staff time spent hearing and investigating appeals.
"The spirit of cooperation [with staff] is gone. There's an adversarial feeling right now," Singer said. On the plus side, he added, "now there's going to be a really tightly organized activist community."
Ms. Pedersen says the reason for the new excessive and punitive rules is that "we're smarter about what we're doing to the earth and we want our gardens to reflect that". How exactly do limiting the height of fences, replacing natural wood with metal and banning rose bushes reflect being better to the earth? Ridiculous!
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