click to enlarge COURTESY OF DAVID ROLAND 
 
 Carl and Janice Duffner. 
 
 click to enlarge COURTESY OF DAVID ROLAND 
 
 The Duffners lawn, photographed last summer, is lush. But it doesn't contain turf grass. 
 
 click to enlarge COURTESY OF DAVID ROLAND 
 
 Another view of the Duffners' yard. 
 
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 A federal judge in St. Louis ruled yesterday that Carl and Janice Duffner can be forced to plant turf grass in their yard — even though Janice Duffner has severe grass allergies.If the Duffners fail to plant the grass, under the ruling, the city of St. Peters can sock them with fines that have potentially grown to well over $200,000 — or even have them sent to prison for several decades.David Roland of the Freedom Center of Missouri, who is representing the Duffners, said the ordinance is so absurd, and the possible punishments so over-the-top, the case could ultimately end up with the U.S. Supreme Court.Suffice it to say, he's appealing."It is so outrageous," he says. "This is a couple with health problems facing gross penalties for what they've chosen not to plant on their personal property. If ever there was a circumstance where the court should intervene, it would be these facts."St. Peters passed an ordinance in the last decade requiring that homeowners cover at least 50 percent of their yard areas with turf grass. And that was a problem for the Duffners, who've owned their home in the well-heeled St. Louis suburb since 2002 — and, upon moving in, had planted a lush flower garden that contains no turf grass, thought it does have other ground cover.In May 2014, the Duffners got a letter from the city saying their yard was not in compliance. The couple applied for a variance, and in July 2014, they were granted one.However, it didn't give them a free pass; it still required them to plant at least five percent turf grass. Absent that, the St. Peters ordinances suggested, they would face fines of at least $10 a day, and potentially much, much more.The couple refused — and, that September, filed a lawsuit.The litigation has taken a long and torturous route. After the Duffners filed in state court, an adverse ruling sent them to appeals court, where they earned a partial victory. But the ruling sent the case back to the lower court. The Duffners chose to instead file in federal court in 2016.Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge John A. Ross issued a ruling that was mostly in favor of the city. He found that even if the facts as presented by the Duffners were true, it wasn't enough to win the case. And with that, he granted summary judgment for St. Peters.Roland says there are some strategic benefits to Ross' decision, and said he's glad to have clarity, more than a year after St. Peters moved for summary judgment.But, he says, the decision cannot be allowed to stand."My estimation is that this is one of the most important property rights cases in the country right now," he says, suggesting that advocacy groups that care about property rights will likely choose to join the Duffners' fight. "We're going to go all hands on deck."Rather than prohibiting certain plants that might be harmful, Roland notes, St. Peters' ordinance instead forces homeowners to proactively plant others. "It's a huge leap conceptually, and that's why it's so dangerous," he says. "By this principle, a city could require you to put in a swimming pool and pay to maintain it. That's the same thing we're talking about here."He adds, "The courts have long found that people have the right to use their personal property in a lawful, harmless way — and have the right to exclude things from their property they don't want there." ||||| Every parent has been there. You tell your child to do something—Clean your room! Go to bed! Do your homework!—and your child just refuses. So you escalate. You may yell or take away privileges or even make a threat so extreme that you hope you never have to carry it out. These parent-child standoffs become spectacles of authority and submission—and they’re counterproductive. The drama typically delays the completion of the assigned task, and while the child might eventually learn the lesson that you best not cross your parents, the reasons why we asked the child to act in the first place often get lost. 
 
 Judges are guilty of this, too, and recently we have seen two prime examples: the depiction, in David Simon’s HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, of federal District Judge Leonard Sand’s efforts to enforce housing desegregation in Yonkers, New York, in the 1980s and 1990s; and federal District Judge David Bunning’s punishment of Kim Davis, a clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, who was jailed last week for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, then released on Tuesday. In each case, the judge’s focus on demanding a show of submission likely delayed compliance with the underlying principle of equal protection of the laws, and diverted attention from that basic principle to a claim of judicial authority. 
 
 When the Supreme Court ruled this summer that the Fourteenth Amendment demands that same-sex couples have the same right to marry as a state affords opposite-sex couples, that ruling rested firmly on the Constitution’s foundational guarantee of equal citizenship, particularly as regards such fundamental personal matters as the decision of whom to marry. If Davis does not feel that she can, in good conscience, comply with that ruling, she should resign from her job. Davis is no private citizen, and this is not a matter of private conscience. As the elected clerk of her county—the office that has responsibility, under Kentucky law, for issuing marriage licenses—she has a constitutional obligation to issue those licenses on an equal basis to same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Her religious objection to same-sex marriage affords her no more legal or moral basis to hold office as clerk but refuse to do her job than would a religious objection to interracial marriage. 
 
 So Davis is in the wrong. But once she refused to comply with the court’s order to issue marriage licenses equally, the question became what to do about it. Like many district judges in his position, Judge Bunning chose to initiate the authority-submission cycle. He found Davis in contempt of court and ordered her to jail until she agreed to comply with his original order (or resign). Notably, the plaintiffs in the case—same-sex couples who want to get a marriage license in their home county, as is their right—specifically disavowed any desire to have Davis placed in jail as a contempt sanction. They asked the court to impose financial penalties instead, on the premise that those penalties would eventually encourage Davis to comply with the court’s original order without, presumably, making her into a martyr. 
 
 Bunning concluded, quite reasonably given Davis’s expressed obstinacy, that financial penalties would not ensure her compliance. But did he have to hold her in contempt in the first place? No. To the contrary, Bunning had powerful tools available to ensure that the plaintiffs and other same-sex couples could get their marriage licenses in Rowan County without demanding that Davis sign those licenses. 
 
 Many members of the public—and even lawyers and judges—assume that contempt is the only power that federal judges have to enforce their orders. That is not true. The Supreme Court has long held that when a defendant fails to comply with an injunction, the court has the power to issue a further order imposing broader obligations, even outside of the contempt process, to ensure compliance. In Rowan County, Bunning could have simply ordered that, if Davis would not carry out her constitutional obligation to issue marriage licenses on an equal basis, she would be forbidden to issue marriage licenses at all. Under Kentucky law, the responsibility for issuing marriage licenses would then devolve onto Rowan County Judge/Executive Walter “Doc” Blevins, who had expressed willingness to issue the licenses on an equal basis. To ensure that Davis did not reap a windfall from that decision, Bunning could have ordered the county to withhold whatever portion of Davis’s salary was attributable to her marriage-license duties and to use that money to reimburse the judge/executive’s office. And she can still be held personally liable for compensatory and even punitive damages for refusing, after the Supreme Court’s decision, to perform her duties because she did not wish to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. 
 
 Had Bunning followed such a course, he would have ensured that same-sex couples could exercise their constitutional rights to marriage equality. And he would plausibly have achieved that result more quickly—and would certainly have done so with less drama—than by sending Davis to jail for contempt. Once Davis was in jail, her deputies issued marriage licenses to which she had refused to attach her name. Bunning released Davis from jail Tuesday after all of the plaintiffs received their licenses from the deputy clerks, but there remains a dispute over the legal status of licenses signed by the deputies. Judge Bunning could have resolved any question about the legal status of the couples’ marriages, without sending anyone to jail, simply by barring Davis from issuing any marriage licenses and letting the judge/executive do it. 
 
 Same goes for the Yonkers case depicted in Show Me a Hero. After finding that the city had engaged in a longstanding practice of intentional racial segregation in housing by directing subsidized housing to the areas of Yonkers that were already predominantly populated by minorities, Judge Sand entered a consent decree ordering the city to adopt an affordable housing ordinance. As the Supreme Court summarized it, that ordinance would condition “the construction of all multifamily housing on the inclusion of at least 20 percent assisted units, granting tax abatements and density bonuses to developers, and providing for zoning changes to allow the placement of housing developments.” 
 
 The affordable housing ordinance became the focal point for massive political opposition in Yonkers, and the city council refused to adopt it. Sand found the city in contempt and ordered that it pay fines that would escalate each day until it adopted the ordinance. As for the individual councilmembers who voted against the ordinance—notably the demagogic ringleader Hank Spallone, played by Alfred Molina—Sand found them in contempt as well and ordered them to be fined and jailed until they changed their votes. Although the Supreme Court stayed, and ultimately overturned, the contempt sanctions against the individual councilmembers, it left the sanctions against the city in place. With Yonkers facing bankruptcy due to the escalating fines, a majority of councilmembers eventually voted for the affordable housing ordinance. 
 
 As in Rowan County, the defendants were clearly in the wrong. But was all the drama necessary? Once the council refused to adopt the affordable housing ordinance, Sand could have just ordered into place its essential components. He could have prohibited any developer from building multifamily housing in the city without including the required number of assisted units. And he could have mirrored the required tax abatements, density bonuses, and zoning changes by simply barring the city from collecting taxes from or enforcing its zoning code against developers to the extent they would be entitled to them. Such a course would have ensured quicker compliance without the spectacle of forcing the councilmembers to go back on their word to their constituents and adopt an ordinance they had opposed. 
 
 To many observers—and, one suspects, to judges Bunning and Sand—the drama is the point. By making a prominent example of those who obstinately refuse to comply with federal-court orders, they believe, we send a strong message that no individual is above the law. But what is the lesson courts are teaching in these cases: that the constitutional principle of equal citizenship is a basic commitment, or simply that judges are powerful people who, like parents, are not to be messed with? Sometimes, basic constitutional principles cannot be enforced without drama; without the 101st Airborne, the Little Rock schools would not have been desegregated. But federal judges should always be focused on vindicating the rights of those who invoke their jurisdiction. If the judges can vindicate those rights without demanding an ostentatious show of submission to their authority, they should do so. 
 
 Samuel Bagenstos is the Frank G. Millard Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. In the first term of the Obama Administration, he served as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Justice. ||||| Mr. Padin contacted the city, which cited the Helvenstons for violating section 60.207 of Orlando’s Land Development Code (failure to maintain ground cover on property) and set a deadline of Nov. 7 to comply. 
 
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 Instead, Mr. Helvenston stood outside his polling site during the last election circulating a petition to change the current code, and then appeared on a local TV news station, telling the reporter and any city officials who happened to be watching, “You’ll take my house before you take my vegetable garden.” 
 
 Gardeners aren’t generally known for their civil disobedience, yet in the last couple of years several have run afoul of local officials for tending vegetables in their front yards. In Ferguson, Mo., a stay-at-home father was ordered to dig up his 55 varieties of edible plants. In Tulsa, Okla., a gardener who didn’t want to remove her veggies and medicinal herbs saw them largely cleared by the city. In Oak Park, Mich., a mother of six named Julie Bass faced up to 93 days in jail for refusing to take out the raised beds in front of her home and plant what the city deemed “suitable” ground cover. 
 
 These and other cases have drawn national attention, as well as outrage from gardeners, some of whom have begun referring to the isolated skirmishes as a broader “war on gardens.” 
 
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 Roger Doiron, the founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a group promoting food gardens, has marshaled support for Ms. Bass and others. “If you define a war as a struggle between opposing forces, this does fit the bill,” he said. The opposing forces, in Mr. Doiron’s view, are progressive-minded gardeners and backward-thinking municipalities. Gardeners, he said, “need to push back. This isn’t about a single garden; this is about the right to garden.” 
 
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 Though rooted in something as innocuous as vegetables, these disputes touch on divisive issues like homeowner rights, property values, sustainability, food integrity and the aesthetics of the traditional American lawn. Ecologists and libertarians alike have gotten into the debate, the latter asserting that the codification of gardens is just one more way the government tells people how to live. 
 
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 Jeff Rowes, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm based in Arlington, Va., that is advising Mr. Helvenston, is adamant. “It’s the micromanagement of land that invades your liberty in a thousand small ways,” he said. 
 
 Invoking the nation’s agrarian past, Mr. Rowes noted, “Washington, Jefferson and Madison were all farmers.” 
 
 For Mr. Padin, the issue is less about the inalienable right to grow snap peas at home than it is about the prerogative to not stand idly by while your property value plummets. Mr. Helvenston’s garden is “messy,” Mr. Padin said, and will attract rats and lower the worth of his rental home. Mr. Padin also questioned Mr. Helvenston’s commitment to maintaining the mulch-covered plot. 
 
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 Mr. Helvenston, who is 40 and wears his hair in the same receding-ponytail style as the martial arts actor Steven Seagal, said that his green thumb isn’t a whim but a financial necessity. Anyone who is going to remove his family’s garden, he told a reporter by phone, “might as well kick down our door, steal food from our table and take off.” 
 
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 Ms. Helvenston took the phone from her husband. “We want to be sustainable,” she said. 
 
 Mr. Helvenston, who has begun referring to his yard as a “patriot garden,” an overt reference to the Victory Gardens planted during World War II, got back on the line, expressing disbelief at the response by Mr. Padin and the city of Orlando: “Who doesn’t like a garden? It’s like punching a baby.” 
 
 THE neatly manicured lawn was imported from England, and has been like a civic religion in the United States since the early 20th century. The desire to make your neighbor’s yard conform apparently goes back even farther. In her book “The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession,” Virginia Scott Jenkins quotes the horticulture writer Peter Henderson, who in 1875 disparaged homeowners who let their grass grow wild and vowed that “the majority will soon shame them into decency.” If Mr. Henderson were alive today, he might be pleased to discover that Americans spend an estimated $30 billion annually on lawn care and divert rivers so those in arid places like Phoenix can spend their Saturdays behind a mower, too. 
 
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 But in recent years, water shortages and growing interest in sustainability have given rise to an alternate view of the lawn. Food Not Lawns, an environmental group, advocates abolishing ornamental grasses in favor of edible gardens, while the National Wildlife Federation sponsors a program for homeowners interested in creating wildlife habitats in their yards. The transformation can start with something as minimal as adding flowers that attract migratory butterflies or be as ambitious as cultivating a wild landscape of Dr. Dolittle proportions, said David Mizejewski, a spokesman for the National Wildlife Federation. 
 
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 “There’s a movement of turning conventional suburban yards into more productive spaces,” Mr. Mizejewski said. His organization has certified about 131,000 wildlife habitats since 2000, he said, almost seven times the number registered during the program’s previous 27 years. 
 
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 As Amy Stewart of the blog Garden Rant put it, “People are going native.” 
 
 If that’s true, someone should inform local municipalities, many of which have spent the last 50 years drafting increasingly restrictive codes governing their residents’ landscaping choices. Orlando’s code, for instance, specifies that planted shrubs “shall be a minimum of 24 inches in height” and “spaced not more than 36 inches apart,” while berms “shall not exceed a slope of 3:1.” The code goes on to list no less than 295 approved and prohibited species. 
 
 Opponents like Mr. Rowes argue that such strict rules are fine when instituted by homeowners associations, where residents “go in with their eyes wide open,” but codification of a homeowner’s landscaping by local governments can be “oppressive.” 
 
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 Jon Ippel, sustainability director for the city of Orlando, said the list of approved and prohibited plantings is intended to create permanent landscaping that survives Florida climate and keeps out invasive species. As for the enforced homogeneity, Mr. Ippel said, the code was written in 1991 and reflects an era when “the aesthetic was more of a formalized thing. Organic, natural planting was out of vogue.” The garden sharing program run by the city of Santa Monica, Calif., where residents are permitted — even encouraged — to plant front-yard gardens, turns out to be the exception, not the rule. 
 
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 City officials frequently cite public health and safety as the main reasons for zoning codes, but the underlying driver is often real estate. John Shaw, the city manager in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, said of zoning codes, “At the end of the day, they’re there to protect homeowners and to protect their property value.” 
 
 Last summer, after Karl Tricamo, the stay-at-home father in Ferguson, was informed that his front-yard garden was in violation, he challenged the city and won a ruling from the Board of Adjustment that allowed him to keep his veggies. 
 
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 Mr. Shaw cited the city’s “Live Well Ferguson” program as an example of its progressive attitude toward healthy practices like gardening. It is the residents, he added, who are often in favor of restrictive landscaping codes. “Some of the largest volume of calls we get are complaints about property conditions,” he said. 
 
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 In many communities where gardeners face fines, including Orlando and Ferguson, code enforcement officials didn’t initially go after the person planting vegetables in the front yard. It wasn’t until one or more neighbors complained that the city responded by following the law as currently set forth. Much like the chicken coops that popped up in suburban backyards a few years ago, front-yard gardens weren’t an issue until they suddenly became one. 
 
 Faced with residents who are adapting to what they perceive as new economic and environmental realities, in ways that don’t always fit the current laws or aesthetic norms, many communities have been caught off guard. Mr. Shaw said flatly, “We weren’t ready for this.” 
 
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 Mr. Doiron, the gardening activist, believes change will come slowly to the traditional lawn, and with resistance from local officials. “We’re going to pull them kicking and screaming into the 21st century if we have to,” he said. 
 
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 IF there’s a Norma Rae in the war on gardens, a public face the movement has coalesced around, it’s Julie Bass, the 43-year-old Michigan mother who faced jail time for tending a front-yard garden. But as Ms. Bass tells it, she was an accidental scofflaw. 
 
 When the roots of a tree planted by the city of Oak Park cracked her sewer line two summers ago, Ms. Bass had to dig up her front lawn. She hadn’t been opposed to grass, or very eco-conscious for that matter, but replanting “a green carpet of nothing,” she said, seemed like a waste of money. Instead, she and her husband hired a carpenter to build and install five large raised garden beds that covered the yard in front of their small brick house in the inner suburb of Detroit. 
 
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 First, however, she checked with officials in Oak Park, and discovered the code was vague in regard to front-yard gardens. She went ahead anyway. Soon she received warnings and then a letter from the city, citing her under the blight ordinance for failing to have “grass, shrubbery or other suitable live plant material” in her front yard. 
 
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 Ms. Bass decided to keep her garden and consulted a lawyer, who told her she faced up to 93 days in prison if found guilty, a startling possibility she noted on her new blog, oakparkhatesveggies. “That’s when everything went viral,” she said. 
 
 Eugene Lumberg, the prosecuting attorney for the city in the case, said the chances of Ms. Bass’s going to jail were “nil to none.” Still, he said, under the city’s laws, violating the zoning ordinance was a criminal misdemeanor, not to mention an unattractive addition to the streetscape. “We’re a city of neat, manicured lawns,” Mr. Lumberg said, expressing disapproval over the expected tangle of tomato vines and adding that “nothing destroys a neighborhood faster” than shabby-looking homes. 
 
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 Ms. Bass said she came to see herself as a champion for gardeners’ rights, especially after her case attracted media attention and support worldwide. “I felt like if I don’t stand up to this petty tyranny,” she said, “it gives the city carte blanche to walk all over anyone.” 
 
 But the city saw an important principle at stake, too: maintaining the delicate balance of comity between neighbors. Individual property rights aren’t absolute, Mr. Lumberg argued. “What if I decide to leave my garbage out for a week before pickup day?” he said. “People say, ‘This is America. It’s my garbage and my property.’ Where does it stop?” 
 
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 Mr. Rowes, the lawyer advising Mr. Helvenston, agrees with that argument, up to a point. “The government gets to draw lines” for the public good, he said, acknowledging that concerns over property values are legitimate and citing as an example of objectionable behavior a homeowner’s burning noxious substances. But with respect to a front-yard garden, he said, “we don’t need to make an aesthetic judgment.” 
 
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 The city of Oak Park was flooded with angry calls and e-mails. But, as Mr. Lumberg pointed out, the great majority of Ms. Bass’s supporters weren’t her neighbors. “If you don’t live next door to it,” he said, “your thinking is different.” 
 
 In a Clintonian echo, Ms. Bass’s case hinged on parsing how one defines “suitable” plant material. In interviews with the media, a city official argued that suitable meant commonly seen in the community, so a front-yard vegetable garden didn’t qualify. Ms. Bass insisted that her cucumbers, melons and jalapeños were the definition of suitable. 
 
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 Perhaps owing to the Bass family’s indicating they were moving to Seattle, or to the negative media attention, the city dismissed the case. The Basses now have chickens at their new home, but no front-yard garden, since their lawn is concrete. 
 
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 Instead, Ms. Bass acts as a kind of elder sage in the garden war. She recently e-mailed Mr. Helvenston, offering advice and encouragement. “I told him, ‘It’s going to be difficult, but you’re fighting a good fight. Hang in there and stay strong.’ ” 
 
 ORLANDO is an unlikely place for a battle over a garden. As the name of the college football stadium reminds visitors, the city’s roots are in citrus growing. In 2007, Mayor Buddy Dyer started GreenWorks Orlando, an ambitious plan spanning decades to turn Orlando into one of the country’s greenest cities. Publicly fighting one of its residents over organic vegetables probably didn’t come up in the drafting meetings. 
 
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 From Mr. Rowes’s view, the Orlando case points to a distinction between what he calls a “corporatized green,” like installing reflective windows in city buildings, and a “grass roots kind of green,” as practiced by the Helvenstons and others. “People just want to be able to grow their own food,” he said. “It’s a rejection of everyone having the same kind of house with the same kind of lawn.” 
 
 Mr. Ippel, the sustainability director, said Orlando is all for sustainability at the grass roots level. “We’re not opposed to gardens,” he said. “We allow chickens in the community. In our view, the story got blown out of proportion.” 
 
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 Mr. Ippel added that the city had undergone a yearlong process to revise its current landscape code to better promote sustainability and flexibility. As part of the process, he said, the city would incorporate codified standards for front-yard gardens. “Hopefully, he’s amenable to making those changes,” Mr. Ippel said of Mr. Helvenston. 
 
 One of the ideas floating around is to require homeowners who plant a front-yard garden to shield it from the street with a fence. Mr. Padin, the owner of the neighboring house, said he would be “100 percent agreeable” to that solution. 
 
 But Mr. Helvenston finds the compromise objectionable. “A fence is expensive,” he said, digging in. “Now you just ruined my return on investment.” 
 
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 While they wait for the city’s updated policy, the Helvenstons continue to tend their vegetable patch (they just harvested edamame) and to drum up support for the garden in their front yard and those elsewhere. “We didn’t want this to happen,” Mr. Helvenston said, in a warning shot to other communities, “but it’s a blessing. It’s gotten more people planting gardens.”
– Janice Duffner is allergic to grass, so she and her husband, Carl, have no lawn—only flowers are planted in their Missouri yard, which also includes ponds and pathways. They bought their St. Peters home in 2002, and in 2008, the Board of Aldermen adopted a city ordinance requiring 50% of residents' yards to be made up of grass turf. Someone eventually filed a complaint about the Duffners' yard; the couple requested an exemption, but it was denied. In 2014, they were granted a variance, but were still required to plant grass on at least 5% of their property. After various court and administrative battles, in 2016, the Duffners filed a civil rights action in federal court, saying they faced up to $180,000 in penalties and 20 years in jail for their refusal to comply. Last week, a federal judge ruled in favor of the city, the Kansas City Star reports. US District Judge John A. Ross ruled that the Duffners "have failed to identify a fundamental right that is restricted by the Turf Grass Ordinance," have failed to show that the penalties for noncompliance with the ordinance are excessive, and that the Supreme Court has held that "aesthetic considerations constitute a legitimate government purpose." He also said the complaint was too general and if a court accepted it, it could place "many, if not all" such zoning laws under scrutiny, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. The couple's lawyer, who says "this is one of the most important property rights cases in the country right now," says the couple will appeal. He tells the Riverfront Times the case could go to the Supreme Court. "This is a couple with health problems facing gross penalties for what they've chosen not to plant on their personal property."