City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, chairman of the council's parks committee, maintained that the city's community gardens "are in need of permanent protection," in a Op-Ed article in yesterday's edition of The New York Times.

"To begin, the city should strengthen rules governing the two-year licenses issued to the volunteers who operate the gardens. The licenses should be automatically renewed as long as the gardening group is cooperating with the Parks Department, providing public access and otherwise complying with regulations," they wrote, adding that "Although it is important that the city be able to evict gardeners who violate the rules, gardeners should not lose their licenses for activities that occur in the surrounding area - public drinking on the sidewalk, for example."

"If a group of gardeners does lose its license or walks away from a plot, the neighborhood should be offered on opportunity to keep that garden running. The Parks Department should reach out to the local City Council member, the community board and nearby gardening groups, and allow 180 days for other people to apply to take over the garden," they urged.

"In order to encourage new gardens," they continued, "the city should let the public now when city-owned land becomes vacant and no specific use is envisioned....We need to make the gardens permanent - perhaps by designating them as parkland or putting restrictions on the use of the land. New Yorkers planted a seed when they created the gardens more than three decades ago. Now we must make sure the city government never uproots them."

The article began with a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there."

Earlier this month men and women dressed in 21st-century thrift-store versions of 18th-century garb riding on bicycles decorated with cardboard cutouts of horses' heads shouted to passers-by on Avenue B that "The bulldozers are coming."

According to an article in the August 2, 2010 edition of The New York Times by Colin Moynihan, the riders, whose trip was modeled on Paul Revere's famous nighttime ride to Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775, "meant to warn people not about an invading military force, but about proposed rules by the city that would alter the status of hundreds of community gardens in the city."

This month an agreement that has regulated community gardens since 2002 and preserved or gave increased protections to about 500 such gardens while designating about 150 for development will expire. The agreement had been reached after the New York State Attorney General had sued the city to block the sale of gardens to developers.

"Although city officials have said they have no plans to develop gardens, rules proposed by the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development do not include any guarantees of preservation," the article said.

"In the 1990s," the article continued, "gardeners and their allies became known for using unorthodox tactics," the article said, "to rally support for their cause. Those included the release of thousands of live crickets during an auction of gardens at One Police Plaza...."

While the existing agreement states that "the city represents that it has no present intention of selling or developing" other gardens, such assurances do not appear in the drafts. "This would be a policy change from preservation to the ability to develop," said Aresh Javadi of the New York City Community Garden Coalition.

Many of the community gardens, especially in the East Village, dramatically transformed vacant lots into lush and very attractive gardens thereby significantly improving the ambience of their neighborhoods.