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.

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.

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.

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?”