should I have to do my neighbours garden

You have your garden as you want, let her have the garden she wants. She never planted your bushes but they encroach her garden, she is entitled not to ant them or the work involved in pruning them. None of Montys business.

Plants and shrubs from both my neighbours gardens have the temerity to grow over to my side of the fence. I just trim them back. What is the problem?

My one real dislike, with good reason, and I have spoken to my neighbours about this, is hops. My skin comes up in great red weals if the hop stalks touch my skin. To trim them back I have to wear a thick top with the cuffs tucked into gloves and make sure they do not go near my face.

Since I explained the problem they have been very good about keeping the hops trimmed back, although odd suckers do still turn up my side of the fence

Buddleia are supposed to be cropped hard to about 18 ins in spring so they will flower now and for the next month or so. If they are cropped now, I don't think they will recover much this year. Having said that they are thugs, great flowers and they attract lots of butterflies, but they do grow out of control very quickly at this time. If your neighbour has cut back the flowers overhanging her side, I would not have thought that would affect your view of it. If it has been seriously cropped she would have had to come to your side to do it. I have had to cut back one side of mine quite seriously to allow us to be able to walk up the path to the shed and it still looks stunning.

I love my garden. It is a bit wild but not out of control. I get cross because we back onto a yard where brambles grow and it is bloody hard work to keep it out of my flower beds. However if my shrubs/trees annoy my neighbours I understand they need to cut back the overhanging bits..tbh they can keep the bits!! We all have different view on what is a 'lovely' garden!

I was sad when a neighbour removed their huge fig tree..I used to enjoy a fresh fig as I gardened.

Lovely garden Penstemmon. My Asters are not out yet, but just about to burst. I have a similar style to yours, but there are six foot fences on both sides of the neighbours. This is good for keeping amicable with them and at the same time stopping the overflow in its tracks.

Thanks Pollen

Lovely garden Penstemmon. Ours was quite good (but not as good as yours) at our old house and our neighbour would trim everything back as far as he could reach into our garden and let the bits drop on our side.

Where we live now we have a very large walnut tree a few feet in from the fence and obviously growing over the neighbours garden. Our old neighbours appreciated the walnuts and all was well. However, our new neighbours, in the middle of last years growing season had the tree cut back to their boundary. We should have had a really good crop last year, but they stopped developing after the tree was cut. Then they moaned that the few walnuts which dropped on their side weren't any good!

Neighbours!!

penstemmon what a lovely garden, mine is like that a bit thats why Im cant understand the neighbours attitude. If i had some lovely flowers growing over my fence from next door I would be grateful and enjoy them.

I have a clematis montana one end of of my long garden border and I have planted a Rambling rector rose at the other end. The border at the bottom of my garden backs onto two other gardens. These two very vigorous plants are very likely to take themselves off into their gardens.

I'll no doubt get shot down in flames for saying this, but I think it's downright anti-social to grow anything that you either can't or won't contain within the boundaries of your own garden, unless neighbours have expressly said that they don't mind.

mamacaz I do not think it is anti social to plant trees or shrubs. It is contributing to the improvement of the air quality for a start and maintaining habitats. Having garden is a responsibility and part of that is not making yourself a nuisance to others I agree. If trees/shrubs encroach on someone else's much loved garden /home that is just not fair! An occasional overgrowth should be tolerated but regular nuisance is not neighbourly! When we moved here I removed a huge leylandii from my garden and the lady next door came round to thank me for the difference I had made to her life. She no longer needed the light on in her living room all day!!

When my (small) garden needed too much effort to maintain, I had it stripped out and gravel laid with just a few plants. Not everyone's taste, I know, but at least it's tidy. While the man was clearing it, my neighbour climbed onto her toilet seat, and started to yell at him through the little upstairs bathroom window (quite funny really). She shrieked that he needed to stop as she liked my plants and it would spoil her garden. Turns out that though I was careful to keep it all on my side of the 5' fences, she had taken some tendrils of honeysuckle, etc and put them in the soil on her side, hoping they'd grow, and this poor man had dislodged them all. I asked him to carry on and she didn't speak to me for months. I wasn't that bothered until she asked me for £20 to replace the plants she accused me of destroying. I paid up to keep the peace and, to be fair to her, she does now have a lovely garden.

One of our neighbours had lovely trees growing around her boundary, mostly conifers which did not form a hedge. No neighbours were complaining.
She decided to have them all cut down, which the tree surgeon did while she was out at work.
When she came home she was nearly in tears, as she realised how exposed and empty looking her garden had become. Her view was of other people's roofs!

We are now giving her cuttings and saplings to fill the garden again. It will be a long wait!

I love trees but I do think they need to be of an appropriate size for a domestic garden. I know that sometimes the trees have been there since before the houses were built but it can be so annoying to not be able to use a large part of my garden due to the sap and bits and pieces falling off the huge trees between my neighbour and I. They rent and don't have the power to cut back, maybe, but I notice that the house is now up for sale and live in hope that someone will do something soon before I have no grass left. It's like autumn all the time!

Huge trees belong in huge gardens or parks.

Neighbours are a lottery. Sounds like you haven't been lucky with yours. At the very least they should have advised you of their intentions in a neighbourly manner as regards pruning back, and by law, offered you the clippings as they are your property.

Neighbours are a lottery, and how I wish you could ask for references for them before buying a house close to them!

We have 6 houses close to us, the occupants of 5 of them are lovely, helpful, and we have drinks together,and help each other out when away. The occupants of the last house, which has an outbuilding making up part of our boundary wall, have fallen out with four of the others, but until now had left us alone.

They recently posted a multipage nasty aggressive letter through our letterbox telling us we had three weeks to move our shed and patio away from their wall, we are not to put plants on our patio because watering them might splash their wall, our tree roots are uprooting their drive (they aren't, and anyway the drive belongs to another lovely neighbour we would be happy to work with if that were the case) etc etc. My husband is sick with worry and can't sleep, doesn't want to walk out of the house in case he sees them. We have gritted our teeth and written a friendly reply offering to do some small things to please him and share the cost, but he will be back, we know they never give up once they have a set idea in their heads, both of them will go off on a rant at the slightest excuse, so not a case of calling round with a cake as peace offering!

Please consider an alternative way of dealing with weeds rather than use a chemical weedkiller. Proprietary weedkillers are so bad for wildlife. Bees are dying out in huge numbers and this is a real problems for pollination, including that of food crops. To get rid of weeds, either pull them out (make sure you get the roots) or cover them completely with an old blanket, duvet cover etc (be sure no light gets in) and over several weeks, they will die off.

Luckylegs, I have great sympathy with your plight. We live in a corner house with a fairly small garden. On one side the crack willows ( belonging to the council), overhang 1/3 of our garden, blocking out the sun for most of the day. The council will only pollard them every 5 years,m but say we can cut them back as much as we want on our side.This is too big a job for us, and too expensive to do regularly. The laurel hedge comes over the fence obstructing our path. They will crop that every 2 years. Between times its down to us. 6 trips to the tip to get rid of the clippings. And no,m you can't insist on giving it back, you can only offer it. On the other side our neighbour has hazel lb trees along the end of our garden, not overhanging, but tv blocking out the evening dun. It's like living in a tunnel, with no sky to see. The willows had been severely pollard ed when we bought the house, and the hazels hadn't been planted,m so they came as a big surprise over the next few years! I've noticed that people who love trees tend to plant them on their borders, knowing full well their neighbours will have a good chunk of them, and never plonk in the middle of their own garden!

Hi
just had the same problem with neighbours. I've gone to the RSPB to look at gardening for wildlife, and said to neighbours that it's against the law to trim/cut hedges whilst there are nesting birds. And that I will trim/ prune everything at the end of the flowering season. In the meantime, I've said that we are enjoying bumble bees, bees, birds, butterflies, bats, by providing them with food and homes, working with nature. Weedkiller does kill bees and other beneficial insects. Dandelions provide the first essential food for bees in the spring. Womankind cannot live without bees to pollinate food crops. I've now got some leaflets from the RSPB for my neighbours to read.https://ww2.rspb.org.uk/makeahomeforwildlife/givenatureahomeinyourgarden/?utm_source=DigitalAds&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=GNaH2016

hi, my neighbour came into my garden and started shouting and laying the law down because we cut back the large laurel bush on our side of the fence! We only prune it every 2/3 years and they weren't there last time it was cut, but I was promptly told off for invading his privacy........on my side of the garden. Blooming cheek

My elderly neighbour feels that anything I have done on our garden involves her opinion. We have boundary markers and her husband used to try to move them. If I planted anything in a certain spot he dug it up. I once found him doing it and asked why. He said it blocked their view of our front door and he liked to know who was coming or going, I put a trellis up some years ago and the old misery was screaming at me as I was blocking her view--- of my garden.

Love and let live but don't get all prissy about a garden and it's weeds or lack of them PLEASE. Respect your neighbour has a different view and be accepting that your over grown garden may be upsetting to them. Imagine if it was the other way round.

In the garden that I look after, it is the last house in the village, so on the other side of the ranch fence is a farmers field. It is too small to be of any use to him so he ignores it, as is his right. The main weeds are stinging nettles which grow taller than me. They invade the garden which is bad enough. But they come right up to the fence and are unsightly and threatening. I used a rake one day and literally pushed them back.

It goes against the grain to garden someone else's field, but next year I must grasp the nettle, literally, and do something to keep them away. I want a strip of about a foot which would be "no mans land" so that there is a clear space between them and the garden. Any advice would be appreciated thanks.

pensionpat Have you tried just going to see the farmer and asking if he'd mind you strimming back the nettles a foot or so? You'd only need to do it a couple of times a season. Thankfully nettles are quite shallow rooted so any that got through to your side should be easy to get rid of. It would be much worse if they were docks or vetch...

I too have a tree hating neighbour. As we are known for our lovely trees , I did ask her why she moved here . On the other side a nice woman but a stranger to weeding. Every year I fight a battle with wild garlic and her borders are full of them. I did explain why she also needs to weed, she agrees but that is as far as it goes. I prefer to get on with my neighbour so I just bite my tongue.