Neighbor planted a palm on my property

Just purchased a property and after doing the survey, I realized my new neighbor planted a palm on my property...The palm is about 8 feet tall and has a terra cotta border (round about 3 feet in diameter) with mulch. I am planning to construct a fence which will cut right through this terra cotta border with the palm ending on my side completely.

How should I handle this situation? I don't think it is practical to up root the palm and plant it on their side, nor stopping and starting the fence and leave a gap where this palm is...

MC

Reply to
miamicuse
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Well since its n yur property yur pretty well free to do what yu want withit. Don't like Palms, cut it down, need the terracotta materials for some other project, pull em u and use it. I don;t think the neighbor is a concern when yu get right dwon to it. But yu need to decide what its worth in the long run. Just run the fenc alongside the palm and be done with it, and every now and every now and then tell the neighbor how much you appreciate his concern for you with planting a palm on your property, just to rub it in. Maybe he will think twice the next time he decides to take initiative and do things without checking first.

Just Carol A. Gulley

Reply to
Köi-Lö

Perhaps you can explain to this neighbor he unknowingly planted his palm on your land and you plan to run a fence. Get some feedback from him. You don't want to alienate a neighbor. He may tell you to keep the plant or he may chose to move it back further onto his land. Find a happy medium if that is possible.

Reply to
Mindful

Depending on the value of the tree (to your neighbor) it may be practical (unless you want an on going war) to move it. Have you considered talking to your neighbor about possibly moving the palm and him paying to have it moved? And who did your survey? A LOT of them are wrong and you may need to have another one done before you destroy property that was put there (in good faith that he owned the property) by a neighbor.

Reply to
Bill R

It doesn't hurt to try being a good neighbor. A diplomatic approach at the start is good. Show your neighbor your survey report.

Remember that surveyors sometimes make mistakes. Thus, if your neighbor disputes the report, offer to delay your fence until the neighbor has his own survey done. However, set a reasonable deadline for that.

Explain to your neighbor that palms are very easily transplanted, even with only a minimal root ball. If he still wants it, he should dig it up and move it to his own property.

Reply to
David E. Ross

g'day mc,

you could go along the 'good neighbour' line, over a cup of tea or such point out the minor discrepancy, and maybe offer to buy another palm of similar ilk for them to plant in their garden.

can't see anything wrong with being neighbourly, and if it is a common fence line then the neighbour has right to pay 1/2 the cost of a fence of the acceptable standard of the nighbourhood.

let us know the outcome hey? hoping it will be win/win all round?

snipped With peace and brightest of blessings,

len

-- "Be Content With What You Have And May You Find Serenity and Tranquillity In A World That You May Not Understand."

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Reply to
gardenlen

Don;t assume whatn yu state dis correct as it doe snot hold true to all the states inthe USA, especiallay when yuyr in AU and making such an assumption. In my state all yu have to do is place the fence 3 inches off property line and yu can do what yu want with the fence adn the neighbor has nbo say so. Or yu can put it on the protpertyl ine and you stil can do what yu want with it, and no way can yuu force or make them pay fopr 50% of the fence costs.

Why buy them anotherpalm when they were stupid to plant it where it did not bel>g'day mc,

Reply to
Köi-Lö

Best to talk about moving the palm and installing a fence with your neighbor. My neighbor was using my yard to get to get to his backyard, and caused a path to appear on my lawn. This put me in an uncomfortable situation too. I talked with the neighbor about planting a hedge along the property line, but he agreed to stop using my lawn for access. No hedge has been needed.

Reply to
Phisherman

This is hardly a gardening question. It's a neighbor relations issue, and a legal issue.

How long has the neighbor been using your property? If it's been long enough, and under the right conditions, adverse possession may apply. They could turn around and officially take the property from you. (I'm assuming that your surveyors did a title search, and didn't just rely on old documents.)

From a less legal, and more practical standpoint, the property line is something that neighbors agree on. Obviously there isn't an agreement here. The question is why. You think the property line is at a certain place because you have a survey in hand. Assuming the survey is correct, that's as good of a reason as can be for you believing the property line is where you believe it is. So why do your neighbors believe it's somewhere else? And exactly where do they believe it is?

If you just storm in and start building a fence where you think the line is, you may ultimately be proven to be entirely within your rights... but it would be at the expense of any civil relationship with those neighbors. If they think the property line is somewhere else, it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong, from their perspective you're attacking, and forcefully trying to take their property.

Now your neighbors may be pure asses, and you may end up at war with them no matter how well you handle the situation. But do you want a guaranteed war, or do you want to at least try to work out this disagreement by talking instead of just building a fence?

So my two pieces of advice are to talk to an attorney, laying out ALL the relevant facts (such as time frames, who's caring for the land now, and how long they have been, etc.), and get a legal opinion. Once you know your true position in this situation, then talk to your neighbors. Informally is best at first. You might get lucky, and they'll just say, "oops! Our mistake. We're sorry". Or they might want to sit down and more formally examine the situation, and still resolve it peacefully and civilly. Or they might want to fight for the disputed territory.

But whatever road is taken, it will be no higher than how you start the resolution process. If you start the resolution process with an act of war, then you'll get no better than war. If you start as neighborly as possible, the road may not continue so high, but at least there's a possibility that it will be so high.

Once you and your neighbor come to a mutual understanding of where the property line is (which absent other facts, I'll assume is where your survey says it is), then you can talk about what to do about the palm and any other landscaping they did on your side of the line. Then you'll have a gardening question. But for now, you have a legal and neighbor relations question that needs to be resolved before gardening becomes the issue.

Reply to
Warren

Negotiate with the neighbour over a coffee or beer, even if you are technically within your rights to decide whatever you want to do without considering them it may not be the best way to go in practice.

David

Reply to
David Hare-Scott

1) You put way too much faith in the surveyor. 2) Based on the experiences with surveyor accuracy, many jurisdictions require fences to be placed not closer than five feet inside a lot line, good side of the fence facing out. (A couple of reasons for that besides the survey problem - that five foot assures a ten foot access corridor -five feet from each property as a fire break and for fire trucks, utility trucks, city trucks, and the like to get behind houses.) 3) You have to live with the neighbor - visit with him, tell him you are thinking about a fence and WHY (you have kids and the local alligators, you have a cat and you want to let it roam the backyard, your pet rottweilers killed somebody last year and you want them under control, etc.), and ask the neighbor if he knows where the lot line actually is. And don't be shocked when he points to a stake from his surveyor that is two feet off from your surveyor's.

I have several pieces of property, and have done surveying for USCG. IMHE, most surveying, even licensed, is a waste of money unless you have a lawsuit, because most surveyors don't shoot off a major benchmark, the only starting point that counts. They shoot in from a pipe or street that moves in construction, unless they have to go to court and get embarrassed by another surveyor. An amicable agreement as to about where it is and moving back six inches off that line makes for friendly neighbors.

I have a dozen stories and a series of surveyors who can't place their truck, let alone a lot line- here are three personal examples of why you shouldn't make bad neighbors for bad surveying, or bad assumptions about whether the actual owner of that dirt put in a tree:

a) I have seen one of my properties surveyed at least six times across 40 years by the various neighbors - each licensed surveyor goes off a pipe benchmark, no two surveyors get it right, and the lot line moves ten feet (yes TEN) each time they survey. Only once was it shot in using a major benchmark. And after 150 years, and 20 years with six licensed and board certified land surveyors along that south line, somebody noticed the lot lines overlapped in the description - by 20 feet! (quit claimed to fix it). They all did chain and rod work, and apparently all missed adjustments for elevation (the earth is close to flat, as are maps - so you have to shoot and adjust for measuring on slopes to get map-flat distances.)

thus problem # 1 - surveyors cutting corners and assuming the last person did good work, and that their survey is pro forma little value.

b) My house in a development 1) has the lot lines marked with buried rerod 2) the plat map has the common lot line listed from the centerline of a road (road being redone, and likely moved a foot or so over next year) and 3) the one coordinating point for the entire development is a major benchmark two miles away, a mile from the edge of the development. The city (wisely) shot in the replacement utility poles and new street lights off the major benchmark and set them at the corners - dead on. Back then, I had asked the surveyor who was shooting in the poles "why shoot?", when they had a ten foot wide easement, and it was the utility companies pole anyway- "Peace among neighbors" was his answer. You would think the locals thought those rerods were given by God and put in by Moses rather than just shoved in the ground near the lot stakes, stakes set by the contractor and replaced by eye after the land was scarfed, rerod shoved in by an 18 yr old summer worker who got within five feet of the moved stakes nearly all the time (fwiw -my 140 foot wide lot has the rods spaced 150 feet, measured using a 100 ft tape on level ground). The several surveyors for the properties on three sides have yet to get close to each others marks.

thus problem # 2 - Surveyors too damn lazy/owner too cheap to shoot off a major benchmark, assumptions about who puts in what (major benchmarks are put in by top pros like USGS, and pipes and rods are put in as guides only by local surveyors), and GPS that has errors: accuracy depends on calibration AT the major mark, the quality of equipment, the type of signal used, and the skill of the user. And it ain't all that damn good, anyway -just cheaper.

c) My lake properties (5 lots in two adjacent additions, on a "peninsula with island" 800 feet across) uses a 3" iron pipe to define a meandering corner for the entire island and two plats. After the original plat, the lake was later dammed and the pipe submerged. Each time an adjacent landowner has bought property, it is surveyed off one of the lesser survey points, and often surveyed in from the water. E.g., I went up one weekend and saw the surveyor's mark for edge of the western neighbor of addition one, saw a mark shot in from the south sitting in the middle of a drive. I had earlier seen a mark from a different surveyor, one who had done the northern neighbor's property which was in additon two, and he shot southward from the north edge - his mark sitting 90 feet to the north of the first neighbor's mark.

Problem was, my 2 lots in the middle of the island on that north-south lot line were 200 feet wide. The survey was obviously wrong, since 90 is not

200. But the owner to the north and the owner to the west each "knew" their mark was correct, because their land was "properly surveyed". Neither surveyor had accounted for the dam making the island smaler, nor had either shot off the 3" pipe ("can't be found" because everybody kept looking near the shore when it actually is 60 feet out in the bay) Satellite photo of present size overlaid on pre-dam map showed the island had lost 110 feet N-S. (this is the same property that had a large lot that was submerged when the lake was dammed leaving it 12 sq ft, but still listed, and fifty years later some newbie country assessor sees a large lot on a map and decides it is waterfront with $2000 a year taxes instead of the $10 it had been for 30 years. County surveyor says maps are only changed there by court order as the result of a lawsuit, etc, etc. )

Thus problem 3 - original maps often suck, many surveyors are too lazy to find a major mark, and there are decades of poor survey records.

Most telling point about all three of the above is that the neighbors won't rock the boat on those lines - they would rather think that their lots go to the best-for-them lines and marks rather than have the lots properly surveyed and maybe find out their lots are smaller than they imagine. Blind bigger is better than smaller truth.

So my advice is don't put your surveyor whom you saw for ten minutes above your neighbor with whom you will have to live with for years.

And don't put in a fence on a lot line, because if you are off six inches the wrong way, you will have a bad festering neighbor forever and much wasted money in lawsuits, as well as pulling out a fence and moving it over - for six lousy inches.

Assume the surveyor was wrong and the line is a foot off - and I would bet you I can find three surveyors to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt he was and three that he was was not.

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"Good fences make good neighbors" was talking about the condition of the fence, not the fences location or that it was a demarcation. Otherwise he would have said "Good fences located by good surveyors make for good neighbors"

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for some reason, landowners and surveyors are like lawyers and engineers - each is expert about the other's business all the while barely knowing what the other does..

---that was cathartic....

Reply to
hob

I hope you had the surveyor to stake the boundaries as well. This may help in any discussions you have with the neighbor.

Before speaking with the neighbor, I'd tie a line between the stakes, so the conversation with the them, would illustrate the surveyor's findings, while trying to calmly come to a resolution...It may be easier than you think.

Myrl Jeffcoat

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Reply to
Myrl Jeffcoat

Reply to
Köi-Lö

Reply to
Köi-Lö

if you don't get it, only you lose.

---fish boy pinged forever

I htink you just like to peck on the

embarrassed

engineers -

Reply to
hob

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