HEDGE HORRORS

And deliver us from evil …. 

Lord save us from the horrors of elderly neighbours and their unreasonable demands! 

For the past week or so, we’ve been subjected almost daily to the saga of next door’s hedge which appears to be more valuable than a Picasso but is nothing more than a yellow winter flowering jasmine.  Winter flowering jasmines are vigorous growers both upwards and outwards.  They can root spread or propagate merely from twigs touching the soil.  If left untamed, they grow into monstrous beasts as has this one whose steady enlargement has broken our fence and encroached on our territory.

 

It's only a hedge!

To throw further fuel upon the garden bonfire, our neighbours had tethered this unruly beast to the back of our fence posts along with their TV aerial cable so the mere suggestion of replacing the rotten posts was almost enough to spark WWIII.  Oh the histrionics!  (on both sides) swiftly followed by a series of ultimatums issued by the pint sized dictator next door.

 

Always ask permission before attaching things to fences

Believe me when I say, you can’t argue with anyone over 80 years old because they just DON’T LISTEN.  They also don’t read any of your emails and concoct their own mental narrative, twisting every conversation round to make you look like the big bad wolf.  It seems that once they’ve made up their minds about something, you’ve as much chance of getting them to change it as persuading a hungry velociraptor that you wouldn’t make a tasty snack.  They don’t understand the notion of reaching a ‘workable compromise’, it’s either their way or the highway.

 

Yup!  That's definitely on 'my land'

The long and the short of our situation is that in order to ‘not touch’ the hedge, the footings, wall and fence posts of our new structure are having to be placed wholly on ‘our land’ because if so much as a gnat’s whisker fell onto ‘their land’ there would doubtless be a fatwa issued against us.

 

Marking out a new footings line on 'our land'

The 11th commandment - Thou shalt not touch my hedge

Unbelievably although it is someone else’s plant that is encroaching into our property it seems you can’t just ask them to dig it up.  There are no laws to back up your case for encroaching vegetation.  The infamous Party Wall Act states that if your neighbour does not agree with your project proposals for erecting a wall on the boundary line between properties then you are obliged to place the whole lot on your land, thus giving them a bigger garden.  If I were Russian, I would have just blasted the hedge to smithereens and that would have been the end of the story but as usual, we’ve done the right thing for a quiet life. 

Footings prepared

I left work today not knowing if I’d find my back garden littered with bodies but to my relief, the landscaper appears to have dealt with the hedge horrors patiently although it’s anyone’s guess as to whether he’ll come back tomorrow to continue the job.

 

New footings - not on 'their land'

My advice to anyone contemplating work on any boundary walls or fences is to make sure you have read the Party Wall Act from cover to cover and ensure you have a shovel handy to deal with the shitty fallout from neighbours.