Live in a loooooong terrace that backs on to another similarly long terrace, with a twitten between the streets. All the gardens have a gate onto the twitten for access, but no one uses it for actual access: at one end, street access is bricked up; at the other, it’s so far from most of the houses and emerges on the road with nightmare parking so even if you clear your garden, you get the lads to go through the house because big work trucks can’t get down that road. Plus every spring it becomes impenetrable with overgrown plants and wildlife.
Most of my neighbours keep a compost bin, leaf mould, narrow tool storage etc out there. A general “live and let live” attitude prevails so if you put a tool store out, you stagger it against your opposite neighbour’s so everyone can have space.
And it’s lovely! Behind ours I have compost and leaf mould, plus wildflowers naturally – I’ve never planted anything but there was six foot tall cow parsley, green alkanet, bluebells, loads of things I can’t identify. DC spend a lot of time there bug hunting, it attracts loads of butterflies – the caterpillarfest in spring was amazing – birds, field mice.
The neighbours opposite have razed the lot. Not only on “their” side but mine. They don’t garden, theirs is fully paved. No reason to do this – they can’t get out through a bricked wall and they’ve left the next space along alone, which is solidly rose/bramble/thicket. A whole mini habitat gone. Now it’s just bare earth for the neighbourhood cats to poo in.
AIBU to be gutted but more importantly, how to respond?! I’d love to do a line of pleached trees in the twitten to block them from my sight but they’d only chop them down I think, and also £££. More wildflowers, obviously. While the land is bare the kids want to paint a mural on the wall saying Save Our Wildflowers & Our Planet (because I suggested it to them 😂) and paint butterflies, ladybirds, bees. Or something permanent/evergreen and purposeful on my side that won’t encroach over their half of the space, but is clearly meant to be there – as they obviously felt the natural aspect of the wildflowers was too much nature – but still pollinator-friendly. Japanese hogweed? 😈