Neighbour's HUGE Tree!

Mollington

Hi there,

we are in the process of buying a house and have realised that, due to a neighbours huge tree, our back garden will be blocked from the sun from about mid afternoon until sun down!

We are gutted!

Of course we will go and see the neighbour and ask nicely if they can take it down, but if they say no... where would we stand legally?

Thank you!

DVardysShadow

Mollington wrote: »

Of course we will go and see the neighbour and ask nicely if they can take it down, but if they say no... where would we stand legally?

You would stand in the street.

If the sun is important to you, do not buy this house. First of all, there could be a tree preservation order. But even if there is not and you strike lucky that the neighbour agrees to take the tree down, don't buy until and unless they do take it down. Because if they go back on their promise, there will be nothing you can do about it apart from have a neighbour dispute which will just highlight the issue when you decide to cut your losses and move.

I suggest that if you must approach the neighbour, do so through your vendor - if they won't play ball, leave well alone.

geoffky

I had this, I went round and knocked the door and asked could i cut back a few trees, the answer was yes and you can cut as many as you like...I made sure i would never have to knock again...good luck..

SAHD_Jim

You have no rights at all if they say no.

Our neighbours to the rear have a 90ft Conifer (they inherited) which has an almost horiontal branch that is wrecking my lawn. To complicate further, it has a tree preservation order on it, meaning they can't even decide to chop it down and I have spoken to a council tree surgeon who says I cannot remove the branch without incurring a very large fine, even though it is over my land.

Trees (and tree owners) have loads of rights that go back to common law. For example if you prune the tree, legally you are meant to offer the cuttings to the tree owner before you dispose of them. It is up to them if they want them or not though.

Thankfully the sun is not blocked for us, the tree actually blocks their sun.

Birdy12

We had the same issue with regards to our neighbour's oak tree. I contacted our local council first to check there wasn't a preservation order on it (there wasn't) and then contacted a tree surgeon for a quote to trim back on the branches hanging over our garden.

I let my neighbour know what we were planning to do. In the end, he got a tree surgeon in himself, after we confirmed we'd pay a proportion, and got the whole tree cut down. I'm glad he did agree - the tree surgeon said he could take away the overhanging branches but it could make the tree unstable.

llh189

I would think seriously about buying a house with an existing tree only to immediately go round and ask the owner of the tree to cut it back or even down, I can only imagine what sort of impression that this would give and what bar it would set for your relationship with your neighbour. You run the risk of turning your dream home in to a bit of a nightmare, I think buy it with the tree and live with it or walk away!

DVardysShadow

Birdy12 wrote: »

We had the same issue with regards to our neighbour's oak tree .... and got the whole tree cut down.

Obviously, Birdy, you must be a ground nester. Your tree nesting cousins must hate you.

pleasedelete

£1700 quoted to remove my massive tree with a tpo in a conservation area. Mixture of planning permission costs and actual removal. The planning may well have been denied as its not automatic that you can get permission to remove even trees that are out of place (a poplar in a residential street).

Can you afford a similar amount if you have to pay?

Like SAHD Jim above all trees here are protected. We cant cut back any overhanging branches and if we did and the tree then became unstable we may be liable.

geoffky

DVardysShadow wrote: »

Obviously, Birdy, you must be a ground nester. Your tree nesting cousins must hate you.

I have a massive oak in my garden that i am working on..:D
A few weeks ago i got up the ladders with a saw to cut limbs off..
As i was working away i cut some branches and here is a wood pigeons nest with a chick in it and its so exposed now as i have cut all the branches around the nest down..
I felt bad but not much i could do,
That night it poured down and my poor wife never slept a wink thinking about the poor bird..well after about 5 days the stupid bird fell out of the nest and it to my garden..so for the last few weeks i have been feeding it with mixed seed and it can now fly but comes at my door every day for its feed..
Day by day it is getting less tame and the distance it allows me to be grows...
My wife loves the thing..

phoebe1989seb

You could always do what our neighbour at our last house did......

....when we moved in there was a 50' conifer (not leylandii) on our land adjacent to our drive. One of the first things the neighbour said was that he'd been hounding the previous owners of our new home to take the tree down, but that they had refused because they were moving - and would we chop it down? We responded that we actually liked the tree as it added a touch of colour to the otherwise ugly landscape. He wasn't impressed - being the one who had chosen to build his ugly bungalow where the orchard to our (Tudor) home had once stood (he had owned our house 20 years previously) and in our opinion had built it far too close

His response to this was to bring in the tree surgeons who proceeded to chop the tree in half vertically through the centre :eek: The result was that from our property the tree looked more or less ok, but from his side (or as you approached from the other end of the road) the tree looked awful - completely bald branches.......it was rather like one of those *half Christmas trees* that you place up against the wall if you haven't got much space, lol!

I can joke about it now, but at the time I was in tears - and to add insult to injury, when we bought our current house last year the first thing our new neighbour asked was if we were intending to remove a tree between our gardens as it blocked out her afternoon sun

DH and I love trees - and fortunately we have many in our new garden so were happy to sacrifice that one - but it seems very few people share that love

~Chameleon~

Native trees are fine but when you go planting eucalyptus trees just be aware of the size they can grow to