Tales from the DNR

WI STATE JOURNAL

SOS: When DNR swoops in, trailside gardeners are out of luck

There have been tomatoes, asparagus, raspberries, onions and other garden-grown goodies sprouting from the strip of land along McCormick Street in Belleville for some 40 years now.

But on Tuesday, Ian Campbell’s decades-old rhubarb plants were being taken over by weeds and fellow gardener Jane Jelle hadn’t even bothered to put in any pumpkins or flowers.

“We kind of have given up because who can fight the government?” Jelle said. “This is going to be nothing but weeds, and who wants to see weeds blowing in their yard?”

Campbell’s and Jelle’s gardens — located across the street from their homes — adjoin what used to be a railroad and today is a section of the Badger State Trail, a 40-mile recreational path that officially opened two years ago.

Since April 2000, the state Department of Natural Resources has been responsible for managing the land, which it leases from the state Department of Transportation.

As such, it’s not land you can garden on, mow or do much more than walk through and gaze at — not that anyone with the state has done much to enforce those rules until about a month ago, when a DNR worker told Campbell that his 36-year-old garden would have to go.

“It’s not that we’ve been ignoring it,” said Steve Johnston, the trail’s DNR manager, but the agency has only so many staff members and it’s not always easy to find people who encroach on state lands.

Johnston said that by gardening and mowing the land, Campbell and Jelle are “basically taking a right that no one else has” — using state land for free — and preventing the land from returning to a DNR-preferred prairie habitat.

Jelle contended that “if we didn’t mow the grass, it would look just terrible over there. ... We’re doing them a favor by maintaining it.”

One neighbor’s overgrown, weedy lot might just be the DNR’s idea of natural habitat, according to Johnston, who said “a prize rose bush in the middle of a football field is a weed.”

As are, apparently, a few tomato plants next to a state trail.