In Fairfax, Gardeners Fear Uprooting of a Culture

Keepers of Community Plots Brace for New Oversight

Through the depths of her cancer, Chris Erickson has come to tend her roses. In four years of illness, she has transformed a rented plot in a Fairfax County park into a "strolling garden," with stone paths past the blossoms and sculpted fruit trees.

Now, the authorities who manage the county's community gardens want to revoke her 30-by-30-foot patch. They say that Erickson's cultivation of woody plants breaks rules designed to prevent permanent plantings and could undermine the goal of community gardening.

"I'm terminally ill. It's been a sad time. The garden is the place I can just be alive," said Erickson, a psychologist who heads the community counseling program at George Washington University. "Even when I'm sick with chemo, I'm out there weeding, and it makes me feel better."

This summer, officials with the Fairfax County Park Authority, which oversees 700 garden plots countywide, released new rules for next year's growing season, and they were posted beside the lively patchwork of plots in Vienna's Nottoway Park. The rules banned roses and raspberries, grapevines and blueberry bushes, and a broad spectrum of plants that live through winter's chill. Trellises would have to be dismantled after each season. Rules for fences would be tightened. And officials would seize any plot "deemed to be used inappropriately."

Many Fairfax gardeners rebelled, gathering petition signatures and sending scathing, point-by-point critiques of the rules, prompting at least a temporary pullback by park officials. A new parks chief, who walked into the dispute just after arriving from a similar job in Athens, Ga., tried to soothe tensions. The rules were rechristened "PROPOSED," and officials promise to appoint a committee, which will include gardeners, to revise the rules in coming weeks.

But that doesn't let gardeners like Erickson off the hook. Her pear, apple, cherry, nectarine and peach trees, with their trunks shortened and young limbs trained over years to fan out in the flat espalier style, are in violation of the rules. So are the bonsai she transplanted. Trees have been banned on the plots for years, but she took that to mean trees that shade the neighbors, which hers don't. Indeed, there were already two taller trees, spawn of the neighboring woods, on the plot when she got it.

Rules for such gardens vary across the Washington region. At Woottons Mill Park community garden, for instance, Rockville and Montgomery County residents have 7 1/2 months to grow anything they want, but the garden gets plowed each fall.

Fairfax parks officials say their attempt to ban roses and many other perennial plants, as well as running plants including red raspberries, which spread underground, makes good management sense. They say plot renters have gotten too permanent in their thinking and have at times strayed far from the original notion of the community garden.

"If you're going to have annual plots, it is counterintuitive to have things that have a long life, like a shrub or a rose," said Cindy Brown, assistant director of the park authority's Green Spring Gardens, where the rules were developed.

New gardeners should have a "clean slate," Brown said. The deep roots of roses and the shade potential of trees could be problems, she said.

"These are plots that you are supposed to be growing vegetables in, mostly," Brown said. "That's one of the concepts behind a community garden. It's the old 'victory garden' type thing. It's to be able to grow fresh vegetables for your home consumption."

But many gardeners say they see the arbitrary spade of bureaucracy reaching into cherished spaces they have lovingly tended for years. The rules allow gardeners in good standing to keep their plot year after year, despite a waiting list. The area is being pushed toward a "lowest common denominator" world of all squash and tomatoes, they say. Especially off-putting is what some see as the government's hunger to impose order and an arbitrary sense of aesthetics.