A BERRY bush may be nature’s answer to the gumball machine. There the thing stands, dispensing bits of cheer by the palmful. And a berry bush needs no coins; the currency is grab and go.
Craig Lassig for The New York Times
The Saskatoon berry plant was moved to a new place in St. Paul.
For a few years now, a pair of Saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia) have dangled clusters of deep purple fruit in front of my duplex in Minneapolis. Picture a wild blueberry after a growth spurt. Every time my children cross from the driveway to the front walk, they alight on the bushes like starlings.
It seemed a shame to leave them behind when my girlfriend and I moved to grander quarters in St. Paul. Not the children: for better or worse, they were coming with us. So why not take the shrubs, too?
Moving a garden, it turns out, raises quandaries that are horticultural, emotional and even legal. We think we own our gardens, but the custody is conditional. Once a plant is in the ground, it has entered terra incognita.
The case law on lilacs is “undeveloped,” said Stewart Sterk, 58, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York. Gardeners may be grabby and they may be querulous. But given the costs of litigation, he said, “no one actually sues about this stuff.”
That doesn’t mean that a seller is free to raid a perennial bed like an open bar in the reception hall next to a dry wedding. “You can view the problem with trees” — or any other plant — “the same way you view the problem with furnaces,” Mr. Sterk said. “It’s a fixture that’s there, and the ordinary expectation is, it’s going to stay there.”
Mr. Sterk is a gardener himself and he laments a “Pinata” rosebush he left behind when he moved to a new house in Mamaroneck, N.Y. The replacements haven’t bloomed as profusely, he said. It seems possible that Mr. Sterk has suffered an injustice here. But good luck suing a rosebush.
The best legal course, Mr. Sterk said, might be to spell out provisions for a beloved plant in the sale contract. But, he acknowledged, “You feel funny telling people, ‘I’m going to take that.’ They might not have even noticed it. But now that you’ve mentioned it, they’re going to notice it.”
The real estate agent is often left to do the shoveling on these disputes. Kathleen Evangelista, 45, a real estate agent in western Nassau County for Prudential Douglas Elliman, once had to negotiate an allowance for a fig tree. The seller, an Italian immigrant, had grown two six-foot trees from seeds that he had collected in the old country.
Franklin Square, N.Y., which is near the Queens County line, doesn’t enjoy a Mediterranean climate. So in the Italian-American community, winter brings “a whole fig-tree ritual,” Ms. Evangelista said. “You have to cover it with a bucket and wrap it in plastic for the season.”
Once it’s in this dormant state (picture a broomstick with a dunce cap), the fig tree must not be disturbed. “We were going to be closing some time in January,” Ms. Evangelista said. “So we had to write into the contract — lawyers had to talk about it — that the seller had the right to come back to the property and dig up the fig trees in the fall.”
They must have been some delicious figs, huh? “The figs were good,” Ms. Evangelista said. “I’m not sure they were any different from any other fig tree. But the man thought they were.”
The trees, it should be said, had been in the ground for more than 20 years. And a man in his late 60s, like Ms. Evangelista’s seller, may not have another 20 years to start over from seed. Our gardens are repositories of emotion and time. And only one of those resources is renewable.
Landscaping on the cheap one November, my girlfriend and I bought a few 4-inch pots of switch grass (Panicum virgatum) at a 70 percent markdown. We planted them in a snow shower, but they came back. Ten years later, the grass clumps were three feet in diameter.
Would a buyer share the pride I’ve taken in my tiny patch of prairie? Or would the new owner prefer (grotesque thought) a lawn?
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