Neighbor Hires A Crew To Jump A Homeowner's Fence & Cut Down All Her Trees
People are urging her to contact a lawyer who practices in the little known field of tree law.
NicolasMcComber / Getty Images Signature / Canva Pro There are few things worse than terrible neighbors. Whether they are noisy, unfriendly, or just downright nosy, they can make your home life deeply annoying, if not downright miserable.
But one woman on TikTok is dealing with a whole new level of neighborly audacity. Loud music? Unruly dogs? Child's play compared to the unhinged situation that unfolded with her neighbor, and it has people urging her to call a lawyer.
The woman's neighbor hired a crew to cut down all her trees.
And you thought your neighbors were a nightmare. Imagine, if you will, that you're at home one day, minding your own business as usual, and you come around a corner to see a crew with saws hacking down a row of trees on your property.
That's what happened to TikToker Meranda one day back in May. "So our neighbors paid to have our trees cut down, and I don't know what to do," she said in a TikTok she filmed while staring slack-jawed at the spectacle.
And it was too late to actually do anything about it. "These guys are almost done, like, cutting a whole tree line that's on our property," she said. "They jumped the fence, got onto our property, but they're parked at the neighbor's house."
simonkr / Getty Images Signature / Canva Pro
The trees were not even on the property line but along a fence that didn't touch her neighbor's yard.
In photos posted to TikTok, Miranda showed off the location of the row of trees, which ran along the fence on her property nowhere near her neighbor's. The photo showed about 20 tree stumps of various thicknesses — some of them very small, but you can envision just how much foliage was there moments before.
"I'm like, actually really upset," Miranda said. "I really liked that tree line. It gave us a lot of privacy to our yard, and we were going to put up a whole little bird section in our yard and put a whole bunch of tree houses up there this year."
Not anymore, and people on TikTok were outraged right along with her. Many urged her to confront her neighbor and wondered why she didn't confront the workmen when they were there.
But Meranda said she wasn't comfortable doing so. The whole thing so rattled her that she wondered if she would be safe getting into conflict with any parties involved. That's when commenters started urging her in another direction — toward calling a lawyer and taking legal action.
hansenn / Getty Images / Canva Pro
Situations like this are so common and messy that there's a whole genre of legal practice called tree law.
Trees are a funny thing. Their trunks may be on your property, but their branches might be partly, mostly, or even entirely on your neighbor's. So whose tree is it?
Those old (or gay) enough to know the film "Steel Magnolias" will remember Shirley MacLaine's character, Ousier, and Tom Skerritt's character, Drum, having gone to court over who, exactly, owns the magnolia tree that straddles their yards.
Court? Over a tree? Yep, you bet. It's very much a thing, to the extent that there are lawyers who practice "tree law" for incidents of unauthorized cutting like Meranda's or far more dramatic ones like who is liable if a tree falls and destroys property or, God forbid, kills a person.
Tree law even became a hot point of contention in last summer's SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in Hollywood after Universal's headquarters illegally chopped the tops off of Ficus trees lining the picket lines, which were providing shade to strikers during a heat wave and are owned by the city of Los Angeles.
Hence the chorus of people in Meranda's comments urging her to contact a tree lawyer, a step she seems to have taken. All the updates she's posted about the incident with her neighbor have been cagily light on information, and in one she suggested that there were hush-hush legal proceedings going on behind the scenes.
But as tree lawyer Barri Bonapart put it to Atlas Obscura, there's probably more to Meranda's tree debacle than the trees themselves. "It’s never about the trees,” she explained. “The trees often serve as lightning rods for other issues that are the psychological underpinning of a dispute that people might have with each other."
That's a likely explanation for this bizarre situation of Meranda's because even after talking to her neighbors about the incident, she found out from another neighbor that the crew returned to her yard while she wasn't home and did more unauthorized work.
The sheer audacity! Calling all tree lawyers: We got a live one!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.