When you live in a quarter million dollar house, property values matter. The
homes in my development range 200 to 400 thousand dollars.

Later you say you live an let live. This is a sticky subject and the spectrum
of opinion is reflected in the comments on the original article. In NYS a man
in Buffalo carried his convictions through around ten years in the courts. He
sold the house to move on one day but he he did not remove his natural
landscape. His was an innocent begining which went atomic with hardheads on
all sides intending to win. (Witness US international situation).

The way you keep your gardens (more likely a yard here) is a subject of
extraordinary comment and sometimes intervention by your neighbor. Nowhere
else on the planet would a homeowner use the time and budget of a court to
challenge weeds. My family own a building in a neighboring city which is
regularly cited by a code violation office for vegetation reaching three feet
or more. The tenant does not do the agreed hacking off, family are not
informed and a huge operation goes into action for want of a knock on the door.


Travel some out of the US and see how much the need to intervene in your
neighbors life is not respected and that would extend to yards/gardens.The
organized living communities should be suspect for what they are. A relative
visiting my sister in Florida parked a rented motorhome in her driveway.
Unfortunately he stayed over the five day alloted period of time and got her a
visit to a local court. In time the infirm and the elderly pass through periods
when garden care is not possible. In more time the ways of the inform and the
elderly take away the problem. Why add to it with such rancor.

There are few here that would not agree that the issue is a minor one except to
the individual who lives next to the untidy garden. Is it not strange then
that the very groups who dislike the untidy gardens also legislate against the
fence that would be the solution in the rest of the world? The fences in my
sister's area are prescribed as to actual being, size, material used, etc.

I live adjoining Mother's Nature's messy acres and in my case it would be
called a green area, a nature preserve or a woodland. Leaves blow in, the
occasional branch falls over and weed seeds enter freely. It is not a managed
fiefdom but you get the idea, if one likes management, one chooses management.
If the occasional soul who's brain hatches an idea wanders in, try a knock on
the door, open the ears,and try to end the American way of lving life by the
$$$$ instead of civility.

We have in this land of celebrated freedom a nasy core of intolerance for the
minority who do not toe the line.

Mike