neighbours cutting down trees...completely annoyed

[Stephen99]

grrrrrrrr

just returned from 3 days super camping with nippers to find that behind us, 2 trees are in the process of being chopped down.

to be fair, i've always thought they must block a certain amount of light from the rear neighbours's houses, but it's bleeping criminal to chop down decades old trees in their early summer pomp. doesn't affect us from ground level but from children's room and loft conversion it makes it less private and just less nice in general.

this is the latest in tree trimming/general foiliage cutting that has made all our back gardens that little less private over the past year...its still a super garden area, but am annoyed.

in fact, am still annoyed from when the new neighbours behind my mum chopped down a tree that was there for all of my childhood...and that happened about 15 years ago.

and am still annoyed from when not long after we moved into this house (2004) a ginourmous tree that came into leaf the very week or our little girl's birth was felled a few weeks later.

i guess i just like trees too much.

tree vandals. grrrrrr again.

and don't get me started on the architectural vandals who destroyed the pleasant 1930s front door and surround/porchy thing in the slighlty bigger house at the end of my mum's road a few years ago.

freakin pvc plastic philistines

still, never mind about that, i can hear the trees being destroyed as i type....

This is one of the world's great divides - those who think trees add greatly to the sum of our existence, and those who think they are merely messy and should be tidied away with extreme prejudice and chainsaws.

I love trees.

Very large ones near houses can block out loads of light and their roots often spread more than the height of the tree so might cause some damage.

I'm having a tree felled next week ... tis only a cypress but it's perfectly healthy; just twice the height of the house and, tree lover though I am, it's got to go.

We had 14 mature sycamores, oaks and the dreaded leylandii felled about 18 months ago together with a load of laurels, and it massively improved the garden, made it miles lighter and more spacious, but the downside is that a cottage down the lane does now overlook a bit of the garden.

At first we were v keen to have something built to obscure the view, but have now relaxed a bit. If the lady in the cottage really wants to stare into our garden from her back bedroom she can but I suspect she has more interesting things to do.

I definitely think there are tree lovers and tree haters. Tree lover me!

this is definitely a retrograde step for our little bit of god's good earth.

i'm going upstairs to wake the wife up, take her up to the loft conversion, turn all the lights on, and make vigourous love to her in front off the window.

those ignorant feckers we have for near neighbours will be out with the leylandai seeds first thing in the morning!

wife didn't respond positively to my idea

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
~Ogden Nash, "Song of the Open Road," 1933

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing "Embraceable You" in spats. ~Woody Allen

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. ~Bill Vaughn

Well, you didn't try very hard, Stephen - four minutes wooing????

But ikwym. I've spent the past six months bewailing the loss of some gorgeous tropical trees where I live in Africa. It's a residential area and all they've done is build a shtty dual carriageway through it! So many palms, frangipani, mango and many other, very old trees, just gone. And also the people who used to make their living trading and selling food etc beneath the trees, gone. The new road now has traffic going in both directions on both* sides and that's when it's not being used as a glorified carpark. And the city has lost a little bit more of its green lung.

My nan lived down a very private lane that became overlooked by a huge new bridge. When my nan died, I loved driving over the bridge and seeing the two huge trees that were planted in her garden when my sister and I were born.

The day that the trees weren't there anymore I had to pull over and weep.

Some trees are special.

wow sue...sounds exotic...my little bit of boring pleasant suburbia deprived of a couple of beeches and your talking abut pams and mangoes! hee hee...

4 minutes wooing is quite a good effort for us, actualy...was feeling romantic ha ha ha ha ha ha !

Also there may have been birds nesting in those trees.

We went to a large shrub/tree nursery earlier this week and salivated over all the beautiful trees they had there.

Have purchased a couple to blank out our neighbours horrendous newly built patio . The joy it will give us planting them on the weekend.

is it just me or am i right in saying trees should not be chopped down for no reason , outside my window on council property there is a gorgeous tree that blooms massive lilac / purple flowers and in summer is full of bees and butterflies but for no reason someone choppped it mostly down and left all the branches they chopped off on the ground they are still there , the tree is always full of gorgeous tiny colourful birds and as i said loads of bees and butterflies yet a random person decided to chop it to bits i think its wrong but i doubt the council will see my point because it dosnt benefit them like big nature parks or nature walks yet we are told to look after trees ect for the benefit of bees , its just wrong

I think part of the problem is that people tend not to do the maintenance on them - they then get huge/out of control and it's too hard/expensive to do it then. We're in a very wooded county and lots of the trees overhanging the roads really need to be properly maintained - but aren't.

Well-kept trees in the right place are wonderful - huge untamed ones really overshadowing people's gardens, less so.

This is an old thread but I can't help but notice just how much MN has changed
If you posted this now, you'd get a barrage of:
"It's none of your business what they do with their own trees"
"Don't you have better things to worry about?"
"At least you have a garden"

Anyway, I hope the OP planted something in their place and the privacy has been restored. (Or the neighbours got fed up of the window action)

I'm about to severely trim all the trees in my backyard as they're too tall for my comfort.

When I spoke to my dad about it he said l should consider if they provide my neighbours with shade (we're in Aus where shade in summer is a premium 🙂) but the trees are ultimately our responsibility if they cause any damage (and it's incredibly windy where I live) so this autumn when the leaves fall, a good chunk off the top of our trees will too.

Maybe they are planning on planting some other, more suitable trees. That is what we did when we moved here. When we first arrived the neighbours probably thought the same as you, because we felled quite few trees that were either old, in unsuitable places or unhealthy) but now there are 3x as many trees here as when we arrived.

Felled a big cedar...... way too big for the garden and blocked out a lot of light. Will plant a smaller one in the corner when it’s cleared.

It looks like a thuggish leylandii. I felled two, they were suffocating the garden with the shade they cast, and nothing grows under them. Well done!

No, it was a blue atlas cedar.

I have two trees that are huge - we're getting around to cutting them right back. They block the light to us and neighbour. Neighbour doesn't want us to cut them (in our garden) but neighbour also isn't happy about anything that we put in our garden as it blocks light apparently. Can't win with them but the trees are going.

Well, you didn't try very hard, Stephen - four minutes wooing????
Listen to the women, Stephen - and try harder!!

Re trees, it happened to me in a previous house. I then couldn't bear to be that overlooked and moved! In this house, quite a few trees are protected though so they're staying. They help with drainage too.

I do have one we are cutting down because it blocks out the neighbours' light at their patio and kitchen. They are delighted after living with it for 30 years! They are big garden people so wouldn't want to see a tree cut down without good reason.

We're country people and live in a forested area but the previous owner of our house planted way too many trees for the size of the plot (think fairly modern four bedroom detached house type). So we got the tree surgeons in and they removed two conifers, an ornamental cherry and have severely pruned a large bay tree, rowan and another cherry. You hardly notice the difference, as we still have a magnificent magnolia and prunus as well as the others mentioned. Our neighbours are delighted as they now have a better view and more light in their sitting room. They were very professional tree surgeons and very reasonable, so we will be having them for tree maintenance every two years.

@Sprig1

Maybe they are planning on planting some other, more suitable trees. That is what we did when we moved here. When we first arrived the neighbours probably thought the same as you, because we felled quite few trees that were either old, in unsuitable places or unhealthy) but now there are 3x as many trees here as when we arrived.

Given that the OP was 13 years ago, it’s likely new trees have grown.