A Clark-Fulton Resident Turned Her Yard Into a Cottage Garden. Cleveland Took Her to Court

Tanisha Caravello, a financial planner living in Clark-Fulton, was sued by the city in March after a Building & Housing inspector found her yard, and all of its flowering 46 plant species, in violation of city law. She’s aiming to take the case to trial in August. Credit: Mark Oprea

Just about as soon as Tanisha Caravello and her husband moved to Cleveland, she yearned to cover every inch of her yard in plants.

She wanted a cottage garden, an old English-style approach to horticulture, which led to Caravello and her husband, Jeremy, planting 46 plant species from the edge of her front sidewalk to the fringe of her backyard shed.

Her taste ran the gamut. By Caravello’s first spring in Clark-Fulton, in 2017, there were a plethora of native and non-native flowers blooming—Ring of Fire sunflowers, Black Eyed Susans, Daisy Gloriosas, Italian oregano to eat, faux strawberry to combat weeds, Shasta daises and Siberian Wallflowers.

“I just love that feeling of creating an ecosystem,” Caravello, 50, said from a table in her dining room off West 41st Street. “I don’t have kids. So it’s my way of creating life, I guess.”

“And kids walk by—they’re so excited,” she added. “Their eyes get all big and whatnot. It makes people smile.”

Everyone except for, it turns out, the Cleveland Department of Building & Housing.

In March, Caravello received a criminal complaint in the mail from Cleveland Municipal Court accusing her of committing a misdemeanor. Last September, the complaint reads, an inspector for Building & Housing cited Caravello’s yard for allegedly being host to a collection of “noxious weeds,” a wide category of plants that, as city code reads, can “aggravate hay fever, asthma, allergic respiratory reaction, or similar conditions.”

Caravello was charged with one count of a minor misdemeanor—“High grass and weeds”—and she would have to show up to court and pay a $95 fine, or take the developing case to trial.

A Building & Housing inspector cited Caravello’s garden as host to “high grass and weeds,” according to a criminal complaint from March. Credit: Mark Oprea

Ends that don’t give Caravello much confidence in the legal system.

“I will keep on getting fined because I’m changing nothing!” Caravello said. “Like, these are flowers. They’re in my yard. I don’t get it. Like, what am I doing wrong?”

Since 2023, Mayor Justin Bibb has beefed up his Building & Housing Department to crack down on negligent homeowners and faraway landlords in a program dubbed Residents First, which carries weighty fines if stairs aren’t repaired or roofs aren’t fixed. Fines and repair costs can climb into the tens of thousands.

But these new laws, intended to bring Cleveland’s aging housing stock into the 21st century, can also mean tricky cases that can seem oddities in the legal system. That is, everyday Clevelanders being brought to court on criminal charges for a precise interpretation of city code those Clevelanders previously knew nothing about.

Which seems to be the case of Caravello and her garden off West 41st.

A case equally perplexing to her husband, Jeremy Kurtti. “Many of our neighbors have always supported us: ‘Your yard is beautiful.’” he said in a phone call. “And yet it’s a criminal misdemeanor.”

Kurtti said he thinks this is simply an instance of poor judgment on the inspector’s part. Especially considering the inspector snapped a “blurry” picture, Kurtti noted, in the fall.

“And probably he’s just not used to seeing this style of gardening,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t seen that many like ours around here.”

“This is nothing new, as the City of Cleveland has always required that homeowners cut their lawns rather than letting the grass grow, which is considered a nuisance and a sign of neglect,” a city spokesperson told Scene. And that Caravello is a “part of a growing trend of homeowners choosing to plant grasses and let them grow without cutting them—whether that’s because they like the way it looks or for other reasons. Regardless of their motivation, doing so violates the City’s longstanding requirements.”

In April, Caravello and Kurtti showed up to court to meet Michael Glazer, the city attorney prosecuting them. Caravello, who studied plant biology and molecular sciences at the University of California, brought a printout of every single one of the 46 species of plant on her property. None, she said, were on Ohio’s nuisance plant list.

In fact, she and Kurtti had been here before. Back in 2018, two years after they relocated to Cleveland from Astoria, Oregon, the two were fined by Building & Housing for similar charges. Caravello paid the ticket and court costs.

But today’s different. Caravello and her husband want to sell the house they’ve repaired and move to Bangor, Maine. And not drag an open misdemeanor case over plants with them. (Glazer declined to comment to Scene on the case.)

“I just feel kind of screwed,” she said. “I just want it to stop.”

“If I knew for sure that I could pay the $95,” she added, “and have them just leave me alone for the last two or months that I’m here? Then, I would.”

Outside, Caravello walked a thin trail to her backyard, where yet-to-blossom Black Eyed Susans craned next to Tiger Lillies. She walked to the front yard, equally covered in flowers grown up to one’s hips or stomach.

As Caravello tended to one of her violet crocus plants, a car drove by on West 41st. “Love it!” a woman yelled.

“See?” Caravello said, standing up. “People do that all the time. All they see here is a beautiful garden.”

“And here am I,” she added, with a laugh. “The criminal gardener.”