I feel for you! I have a very similar situation. My neighbor hates my trees, shrubs, everything and walks on my side of her fence and has been spraying round-up for years. All grass, groundcover is dead 5 feet on the property line on my side. My 5-yr. old new arborvitae tree looks worse than the day planted and has not grown an inch. My tall Leland cypress trees are brown on the bottom halves and look poorly, not to mention she stubbed many of them to the trunk, took out limbs up to 8 ft above the ground, the trees look awful! Her goal is to kill them-after 10 years of growth. I know that I am venting. So what to do with crazy? At first I though she was just mean. I do believe she poisoned my cat 8 months ago, since she had threatened me the month before. The law is very unhelpful. Laws exist, but one practically has to catch enough photos and film footage to prove anything! Or eyewitnesses that are willing to testify. The person can go to court and lie, which is what the neighbor does all the time. A preponderance of evidence is what the policeman told me. So I have been installing surveillance cameras around my home and plans for one or two to shoot down the fencerow. After $200 and trial and error, please get a complete system, donât try to piece mill these things together unless you are technically, electronic savvy. After working with wired cameras for a while which now requires a transmitter and receiver if you want camera placed a great distance from your house, I would advise IP cameras if you have a reliable router. The summary is that neither system is foolproof, so easiest may be the IP. I am ditching my wired ones soon and buying IP, more money. I just hope to catch her and sue, or stop vandalism-which may require continual vigilance on my part. Also get a reputable tree specialist to take a look at your plants, one that wins cases in court. The value placed on plants and trees a tree is not always just the monetary purchase value, the staff told me trees can value at 1000 or more. Besides, it is against US law and may local ordinances to poison (put adverse chemicals on) someoneâs land against their permission. I donât know the penalties for this. Regarding fencing, great idea, but it canât stop the herbicide run-off. Bad Neighbor has built a damn along her fencerow; water does not flow downhill but back on me and none on her. Again against the law for person to damn up the natural flow of water and cause harmful consequences on anotherâs land. Fence may stop direct application on trees and bushes, but my neighbor is so crazy that I figure she will sneak on my side of the fence to do her dirty deeds. The situation I face is complex and fraught with impediments, all maniacally crafted to an almost impossible web. I too have thought about moving, which is exactly what my neighbor wants, control of my land. I have never been so hopeful for someone to die sooner than later.

When you have multiple less-than-desirable tenants in a row, the problem is the owner, not the tenant du jour... i.e. sometimes you CAN throw money at a problem. ;') Following on jakabedy's post, find out how much rent the place is pulling in its run-down condition, then talk to realtors or other landlords about what it would pull with $NN put into it. Run the spreadsheet, you may be surprised at how profitable it could be, esp. in a college town. Dividing into 2 or more apts. may be necessary... but not if it's the only such unit in the 'hood... no sense alienating 12 good neighbors to get rid of 1 bad egg. I am the hero of a nice Ft. Lauderdale neighborhood I don't even live in, because I bought and rehab'd a duplex which the absentee alky owner had allowed to decline to the point where only criminals and deadbeats would rent it... nightmare of the neighborhood. It wasn't listed, but the across-street neighbor ($500K single family home) is a friend of mine (who often let FLPD undercover do surveillance from his living room--yep, that bad), got me in touch with the owner... I pitched it several times, told him the boom might end soon, who knows, better cash out before the bust, yada-yada... suggested he take the lump and put it in a nice safe annuity, instead of trying to collect from flaky tenants who are in county lockup... he was usually toasted, so I had to go slow and sketch it on paper... finally nudged the guy to sell. At the closing, he reeked of bourbon. Your derelict house across the street probably has a similar story. I turned out the month-to-month deadbeats, put the place on a business footing, did a major remod, and now get more than TWICE the rent he did, from solid responsible tenants. Former owner was basically throwing away over $1400 a month! (Hope he took the equity $$ and got the help he needed, but meantime, the integrity of a classy subdivision was restored.) Keep us posted, yours is an interesting story...

I'm no expert, but that sure looks like water damage to me. My thought exactly. If she's got drainage problems, that seems to be the more likely cause. Root cracks to foundations tend to be subgrade-that crack is pretty high up to be caused by roots. Plus it looks like it's bowing outward-I wonder if there is water damage inside the garage? Before I saw the photo I thought you should probably hire an engineer to look into this-to rule out some other issues, but looking at the photo and that she agrees to pay toward cutting it down, I'd do that instead. I can't imagine that it'd cost you $500 for sod, much less grass seed and a few shrubs to replace the tree. I think that the tree is too close to her structure, but I don't think it's the cause of the crack. My next door neighbor has (had) a lot of large trees on his property-one giant maple was at least 4 feet diameter and hung out over our deck. He also had some 80 foot poplars-some were dead, that fell and had to be removed. We had some 60 foot cherry trees cut down on our property line-they were all planted before the properties had been subdivided, but grew up along the property lines. This past winter his giant maple broke down the center and part fell and just missed the neighbor behind us house. It literally grazed the side of their house. I told him that the remainder of the tree needed to come out because it would fall and hit our house but he refused to do anything about it. I called our local government, no tree ordinances, not even hazard trees! I called the fire marshall, I called our insurance company and was advised to write him a certified letter notifying him of our intention to file suit to have the tree removed if he didn't act within 30 days. Our insurance would not pay out on a claim if he knowingly left the remainder of the tree uncut. He evenutally had that huge branch that hung out over our house cut down (it was at least 40 feet long) and the remainder of the snags from the other limb that had broken off, but he left the stump-about 10 feet tall, with one limb that hangs out over his garage. The tree is rotten-all his trees are over 70 years old and at the end of their lives, but he refuses to cut them out. We cut down an old maple from our front yard that was rotting in the center-just two weeks before a windstorm that broke a large limb off a sweet gum tree in our front yard. We have planted new, replacement trees, in more appropriate spots and more appropriate for the size of our lot.

It is a once blooming rambler from 1895. It was in our garden when we moved in, and had NO CARE for at least 20 years before that. From where it was growing, along the fence but surrounded by a Japanese quince bush and a Flowering Crab Apple tree, it had climbed up the tree, and puts on a great display every year right after the tree stops blooming. What I am trying to say is that it is, here, a very strong rose. No idea what it would do in FLA. Jackie