Hello
I'm not much of a gardener and suffer from hayfever quite a bit but I need to redo the turf in our back garden as it's currently a muddy mess, and also need to know what to do re tree roots. Hopefully I can explain below, it may be a long story but hopefully it gives a full picture.
Issues I have is the two houses behind me have the most enormous trees. So these trees cast a huge amount of shade and the roots are all over my garden for context it's 9m from the back of my house to the trees, and same distance from their house to the trees.
Basically we live in a town and these are the only trees this size for miles. Reasons for this is one of the neighbors doesn't want to pay for them to be reduced in size - we did pay for these to be pollared about 2 years ago and found them to be unsafe as ivy had taken over internally. These have now re grown and need cutting again frankly.
The other neighbors refuses point blank to allow anything other than over hanging branches , and it's not just us that have asked. All the neighbors have. The trees are now bigger than the houses.
Which brings me to the roots, there are roots as thick as my arm, if not thicker, about 6" below the surface of my garden due to these trees.
The ground is seemingly full of rubble and rusted nails , it's a 1950s house built on land that was a railway to the docks and was built after the house next door so the rubble is all from that. It's also quite clay like.
Because of the rubble that is also in the garden we want to rotovate, however given how close the roots we will hit them with the rotovator.
So the questions I have are
as roots are on our property , can we legally cut theses roots?
What turf is suitable for shady area that will also stand up to two kids running amock?