Genuinely upset at this wildflower destruction

[pelargoniums]

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? 😈

I love gardening and wild flower areas. But if that is the only escape route from your garden, I wouldn't want to block it. In the event of a fire, you and your DC may need to use it.

i am from sussex
and yes to the twitten
but also snicket

I am so happy to have learned these two lovely words today!

I know it as ginnel, loke or twitchel.

I'm surprised some people still think the neighbours did something wrong when the "cow parsley" may well have been poisonous.

Bindweed? Very invasive.

I think Twitter is called X now

I’m beginning to think the OP’s obsession with wildflowers might be seen as something of a pain by the neighbours on the street who are all struggling to control the weeds spreading into their gardens from hers ;)

Lol. Clearly I meant twitten and it auto corrected.

Jigga or entry

I think in a fire you'd manage to walk over some weeds.

My point is that escape routes should be clear. People shouldn't be expected to scale rose bushes or wade through toxic plants when escaping a fire.

There are two kinds of hogweed. Normal hogweed, which isn't harmful and can grow to 6ft, and giant hogweed, which can get up to at least 8 feet. That's the one with the nasty juice. What people are calling hemlock is officially hemlock water dropwort- which is indeed extremely poisonous, but tends only to grow in damp or boggy places.

I would be devastated if I were you OP, fucking devastated. Our attempts to manage verges for nature around the village are being foiled by the tidy brigade, swooping in with their mowers and weedkiller.

It will grow back though. You have to work out how to stop the neighbours trashing it again.

If you leave it alone it's not going to harm you. Even if it was giant hogweed, which it doesn't look like from the photos. I'm lying in my van on a campsite right now surrounded by deadly poisonous plants (foxgloves), and given that I'm not intending to eat them I'm in no danger at all.

Bit of difference between a plant that’s poisonous if you eat it and one that burns if you touch it, no?

YANBU. Put some citrus fruit peel with eucalyptus oil on it in the area. That deters cats, without harming them. Their cat will find another area to poo.

do you think these neighbours actually want to use 'their' side of the twitten/ ginnel/ vennel/ wynd (the last two are Scots words for similar things) in the same way as you/ others in the two streets (i.e. for a compost bin/ toolstore)? or for something else? or are just neat-freaks who can't abide to see somewhere looking 'messy'?

if they don't actually leave their garden and go out there very often, would they even notice if their gateway was erm locked from the outside?

A hedge around a run-down old house near me used to be alive with birds. Everytime you walked past it in the summer you’d be deafened by birdsong.

The house went up for sale. The new owners razed ALL all the hedges. (I’m sure it’s illegal to destroy a hedge full of nesting birds but they did it.) They removed anything green from the whole plot. They lived in the house for a month and then left.

I’m still upset.

Just sneaking in to add the word 'vennel' to the thesaurus we're compiling. Scottish word which I know from East Lothian (I don't know how widespread it is)

I’m in Kent - it’s not cow parsley. I was picking cow parsley for my horse so I have to know the difference so I don’t accidentally feed him hemlock or hogweed

Do you genuinely think that giant hogweed burns you if you just touch it??

You need to make contact with the sap.

It was called an entry where I grew up in Birkenhead. You'd put your bin, which back then was cylindrical and usually metal, outside your backyard door on Bin Day, and the binmen would fetch them and carry them to the bin lorry. Of course, wheelie bins have put paid to all that.

We don't tend to have many back to back terraces in Cornwall, but a narrow alley here is called an ope.

Which could easily happen if someone didn’t know what it was. It does happen, and people end up in hospital. So do animals for that matter. Anyway it’s likely not that so beside the point I suppose.

West Midlands here and we say gulley, alley, or rat run

What a shame 😞 But.. I love the word twitten ❤️