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.

Good morning. There were no marks, even in the grass, after they left. I would have never known they had even drove where they did had I not been out there. "not that your trees.. in the future.. can not put roots in compacted soil ..." Oh! I thought it was both. Well, then I'm not worried at all. The Maples are only 4 ft tall, 18 feet apart from each other, so when they drove between 2 of them, there is no way they drove over any of their roots. They were just planted 3 1/2 months ago. They actually drove over our entire leach field, start to finish, well finish to start since the septic tank field starts at our house and goes out and they came in driving right up to the house over that field. But again, there were no lines anywhere in our yard from where they drove so I'm not concerned. I guess it's just I remember the previous owner saying NEVER ever drive over the septic system. I never forgot his words so when this happened I got scared. Septic systems are expensive out here! The reason I know this is because during the home inspection when we were buying the house, evidently the inspector flushed the toilet as part of the inspection, and the wife of the seller was there when this happened. Apparently the toilet was backed up in a way that signaled to the inspector that the septic field needed to be completely replaced. We heard she was pissed! We were told be thankful that inspector caught that because if this had happened after closing, dh and I would have been on the hook for it.

All of which goes to show....do what it takes not to fight with your neighbors. They may be unreasonable (one of ours called the cops to report an abandoned car parked in front of our house....that belonged to my daughter who was on vacation). They may be dead wrong (one of ours thought that, because their property is subject to an easement for use by their adjoining neighbors, they had an easement to use my property). They may even be right (when we were first married more than 30 years ago, another of ours objected that our dog, who we had trained to retrieve the newspaper, was taking their paper. She was.). We have learned to be considerate. When their wishes infringe on our right to live as we please, we set down boundaries, explaining why and what we are doing, accommodating what we can. Neighbor doesn't like cars parked in our driveway? Too bad. We have friends. Neighbor likes to spray the property line with Roundup? Fine, so long as not one drop gets on my plants planted along the fence line. Neighbor doesn't like the view of my yard from their living room window? Fair enough. We do what we can, planting screening to soften infrastructure installed by the developer. Of course I wonder why they didn't do the same on their own property. But I screen nonetheless. It's all part of being a good neighbor. Funny how barking dogs and trash containers get people nuts. We have neighbors who seems to think that leaving the emptied trash containers up on the street for an hour past trash pickup is a sign of poor breeding. Oh well. The green can is so heavy that I cannot wrangle it up the driveway. I get half way up, and it rolls me right back down. So when my gardener fills it, he also does the service of putting the green can up by the street. Neighborhoods used to be organized with those wonderful alleyways at the back of the property. We don't live in that world any more. As for dogs, there's a big difference between a young dog learning to enjoy staying in the yard alone for the first time and a dog that barks all day, every work day while its owner is at work. But not to my neighbors.

I had the same problem as I was converting most of my yard into one big garden. I live on .4 acres. I am making almost all of my front yard a cottage garden. The problem is in the first couple of years it can really look scant and irregular until all the flowers reseed, spread, and fill the area. Now that my sweet williams (dianthus) and coreopsis are spreading rapidly it looks more solid and currently full of beautiful color. Don't give up. I would suggest planting perennials that readily reseed and easily divide. These will quickly fill in to give a more full look. Also, plant randomly together so that as one plant is fading in color another is coming into flower. I planted 1,000 stargazer lilies to pick up the slack when others may be going out of flower. In the fall I have goldenrod and asters to makeup the color different along with some spider lilies. Don't be afraid to mix up your plants. The point of a cottage garden is to have that wild random look like God has done in nature. You don't see God planting trees, shrubs, and flowers in rows in the wild areas of our country. We find beauty in randomness because it is harder for us to put it together in groups. This is why planting in groups of odd numbers is more attractive. Couple that with mixing about 3 species together and you have a great combination.