To be irritated my neighbour sees asking her to sort our garden boundary once a year as HARRASSMENT!

[Gentleness]

I mean we ask once a year. The area is a passageway between 2 gardens giving her rear access to her garden next-door-but-one. Last time she said she couldn't afford it and we said fair enough but it is damaging our fence and enroaching into our garden (we're talking 12ft high brambles etc) so hopefully soon. This time I just went round with freshly baked muffins and offered to pay £100 toward the cost (about 1/2) or help physically.

She immediately waved me away, claimed we were pressurising her, claimed the muffins were a bribe (a BRIBE!), claimed she'd given us permission to sort it ourselves, claimed we keep on asking her and said it sounded like we were demanding it to be sorted. I stressed we just wanted to work with her on it, we couldn't afford the money or time ourselves and I'm limited physically (2 kids

kick her in the fanjo

I'm on the other side in this situation. Our home was empty for sometime and the courtyard neighbours act like the garden belongs to them. They used to sit on our wall (their properties are at a higher level) looking into our garden and my daughters began to feel uncomfortable with one of the men. They threw bottles into the garden etc when they had parties, even put their dog on the wall groomed it and threw the hair in our garden! We put up a hedge and boy do they hate it.

They also complain about a tree that was there prior to their conversions.

Last year I got everything chopped back after a lot of pressure. It cost me £450 - now they want it done again and I just cannot afford it. They are rude, snobbish people who are second home owners and do not even like local people. I have become very touchy about being told what to do with my own garden now and perhaps she feels a bit like this.

However, if I had been approached in the way you did, matters may well be different. I would have appreciated your efforts and most of all, appreciated the offer of financial assistance.

I would not though have been happy about any friends offering to assist simply because I cannot abide my pedantic, fussy old fart neighbours.

So are you going to do the mates round and BBQ thing?

A neighbour of ours 'asks us' in early September to cut a (slow growing) hedge on our boundary EVERY FUcKInG year and every FUCkInG year I tell her that it gets cut in October/ November.
She approached our gardener last year who told her that if it was cut too early it would die. Her reply was 'good'.
My other neighbour told me that the previous owners had planted it because their fence was is such a state of disrepair. Now that their fence has been replaced they want rid of the hedge.
If she brought me bloody muffins I wouldnt be happy.

Yours is a different story but you sound like you are pressurising her into doing this and I hate the muffin idea. :(
It may be way low on her priorities. She may not have the other half of the money. I would do it yourself because it bothers you more than it bothers her.

www.allotments-uk.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=4593
This bit is from the last post, it seems like you have some serious work ahead of you!
"Usual vegetation - nettles docks brambles etc. Bought a large rotorvator but wouldn't touch it - just bounced over the top. War was declared ! Hired a mini digger, much too the chagrin of other plot holders, and broke up the surface to a depth of about 24 ins. Cost me about £75 but money well spent in my book. "

Another thread full of suggestions.
it seems that cutting them off at the roots, waiting a week for them to dry, then burning them works.
forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=520129

Just a thought, are you sure she owns it? I lived somewhere like this a while ago, in old terraces, the alley gave access to my garden alone but it wasn't actually on my deeds.... And as I didnt use the access and had no cash and it wasn't mine..... Well I left it to itself.

joric we had a similar situation in a previous house which came with a little patch of protected woodland at the back, adjoined to our garden.

Our house had been there about 40 years, and the woods were anything up to a couple of hundred years old. Some houses had been built about ten years previously, and they had been built right in the shadow of these enormous protected trees, with very small back gardens that were in permanent shade.

The trees had been equally large and established when they'd bought the houses, but it didn't stop them all knocking on my door en-masse before I'd barely unpacked any boxes, asking me if I'd pay to have them all pollarded, (we are talking about 15 trees that were close to their boundaries, so not a cheap job!) as they were a 'risk' to their houses and might blow over in a storm or injure their children if they dropped a branch. All nonsense really - they just wanted a bit more sunshine!

There were not a bloody risk, they were just an inconvenience, but that was hardly my problem, was it? We checked that our insurance policy covered us for any liability if one fell - and we were indeed covered, provided we could prove that we periodically did a risk assessment check on them. We paid to have a tree surgeon do a check on the whole bit of woodland (about quarter of an acre) just to check that none of them were obviously diseased or imminently about to fall over. Then, once we knew we were covered from all angles, we politely declined to pay a penny. We did give them permission to access our land, and pay to get it done themselves though.

Sorry that wasn';t to Joric, it was to Elsie.

If I were you I would check deeds, if that part of the alley way is hers and she is supposed to maintain it I would get a solicitors letter sent advising that it is to be cut back and maintained.

The whole "whose responsibility is it" issue regarding alleys is driving DP and me potty. We are an end terrace - there are about 16 immediate houses and 10 flats that gain access to their back gardens using the alleys which run up the side of our house and along the backs of the houses beside and behind (the ones behind us also have an alley that leads from their road to the central alley).

As we and our non-joined next door neighbour's houses and gardens abut the lion's share of the alley, we feel obliged to try and keep it from getting too overgrown and periodically removing the mountains of rubbish the local kids drop on their way from the shops. But this is backbreaking, grotty work and although it does benefit us in that we don't have giant brambles and grasses growing all up our fences, our deeds show that the alleys are not on our property and are therefore not officially our responsibility.

These alleys are used non-stop throughout the day as a cut through from the park and lots of other houses to the shops and schools on our road - I actually wrote to the Borough and County councils yesterday after another afternoon of getting ripped to shreds on brambles and having to dispose of absolutely tons of garden waste and other people's litter as I'm sick of having to pay in terms of my and DP's time, effort and real cash in buying the garden waste bags and taking them to the dump when we don't even use the alley beyond our side gate.

I feel your pain OP and maybe you can contact the council in your area to find out whose responsibility the maintenance actually is? I'm hoping that as ours isn't a dead end and is used as a right of way that we can get some sort of agreement to maintain it once a year from either the Borough or the County council.

I'd remind the neighbour the cost of a new fence. Houses take maintenance or they'll cost money in the long run.

Swallowedafly- You're complaining that your neighbours fence isn't very good, but does he want a fence? It sounds like you want a fence there but want him to pay. You also want a higher fence but want him to pay again? If you want a fence get your own and stop expecting your neighbour to provide for you.

YANBU but I would get it looked at - its a right mess by the sound of it and it could be knotweed or anything. Surely there is some legal means you can go through - her property is damaging yours, she should sort it out - her responsibilty.

SwallowedAFly I was also going to say why don't you put up your own fence? Have you got six inches or so along your garden to put up a huge Six foot fence? Then the miserable old sod can't see you!

Update and apology for missing all these replies till now!

We thought about taking it further with insisting on our rights and so on but in the end decided it wasn't worth it to us. There is clearly a bit of ill-will from her and our immediate neighbours on the other side that we are a "young, well-off, easy life" couple who moved in and spent £££ on extending and improving the house straight away. Well we're not THAT young and we saved and saved and lived cheaply and budgeted to the last penny to afford what we did, and we go without a lot so I can be a SAHM for now, but they wouldn't know that. And there isn't much point in antagonising them as neither of them is going to move or change their character any time soon.

So today we had our bbq, bit last minute, but managed to get some wonderful friends together with some killer industrial-strength tools. They cut down 80% of the way down and we bagged most of that up. I didn't invite her because I wanted to have a relaxed time which we did. Thank God for kind, lovely people who accept my muffins, compliment them AND shred brambles for us!

And thanks especially for the links to those threads iscream as we've still got a long way to go to be able to use the land on our side to grow more than brambles - very useful if daunting...

You're welcome. I hope next summer will be bramble free for you.

Hi, I'm a tree surgeon and I've sorted problems like this before. Get a small ladder and buy a 3 or 5 litre pump sprayer. Should be about 20 to 25 quid. Get some roundup or some cheaper form of glyphosate then you can use the ladder to spray over the fence. Do this once a month on a non windy day with no rain. And you'll kill off everything that the weedkiller touches. Happy weed killing!