It's ambiguous in English but in most cases, unless you're making a special play on words, you don't want ambiguity. My personal opinion is that just because it's ambiguous in English doesn't mean that we should intentionally inject ambiguity into the Esperanto translation - except when you genuinely eant to keep someone in the dark as to the meaning! (this is seldom the case in Esperanto)

I find it hard to believe that plants would suddenly stop growing, so your interpretation of the sentence in which the plants are fine where they are, so long as they stop growing, seems to have a weak basis in fact.

As it happens, in the version "ŝi ne volas ke plantoj kresku apud ...", if you accept the premise that plants can be living and not growing, it works. She doesn't want tomato plants to grow next to the porch. That can cover the interpretation that no tomato plants should be there, period, and also that tomato plants are ok there so long as they don't grow. If this is the meaning that you're after.

Hyperboreus:The last example, coined and made famous by Noam Chomsky himself, points out an important fact of linguistics: A sentence can be completely correct and well-formed on the syntactic level and at the same time be complete rubbish on the semantic level.

That statement pretty accurately describes Noam Chomsky's political views as well.

erinja:It's ambiguous in English but in most cases, unless you're making a special play on words, you don't want ambiguity. My personal opinion is that just because it's ambiguous in English doesn't mean that we should intentionally inject ambiguity into the Esperanto translation -

I pretty much agree. Ideally there would be an unambiguous way to indicate that I really mean both things.

erinja: I find it hard to believe that plants would suddenly stop growing, so your interpretation of the sentence in which the plants are fine where they are, so long as they stop growing, seems to have a weak basis in fact.

I didn't say it was a good argument, but Grandma wants what she wants, and facts are often irrelevant.

erinja:As it happens, in the version "ŝi ne volas ke plantoj kresku apud ...", if you accept the premise that plants can be living and not growing, it works. She doesn't want tomato plants to grow next to the porch. That can cover the interpretation that no tomato plants should be there, period, and also that tomato plants are ok there so long as they don't grow. If this is the meaning that you're after.

This works. Thanks!

It is generally the case Zazi that Esperanto disambiguates.

But in this case of ne volas ke la plantoj kresku apud.. there is some uncertainty as to whether the focus is on the location or the kreskado.

You can see this, if the issue was the blocking of light or the release of certain vapours at a certain stage in the life of the tomato plant, rather than being about the aesthetics of the garden layout..

To highlight the location as the issue Grandma could say Mi ne volas la tomato-plantojn apud la ...

Translation into another language can often tease out a lack of clarity in the original language. You can see here how an argument for the educational value of teaching Esperanto in the schools can be developed - how this might improve the pupil's command of his mother tongue.

Why Esperanto might achieve this aim better than say, French or Spanish or German, is because it is much quicker to reach the stage where such high level analysis translation exercises can be included in the lessons.