When gardening neighbors tangle, out come bleach, teeth, gauze, and police.
Just checking your geraniums… Photo: via Creative Screenwriting.
For those who think gardening’s just sunny, a harmless diversion for the mild of manner, consider two neighbors from Berkshire in the U.K. They wound up in court on Valentine’s Day over a sizzling floral dispute and a bloody stump.
It all began, like the War in Iraq, over “my space”—who was entitled to park where. The psychic elbowing then shifted, ah yes, to gardens. One woman didn’t like how the other was planting her flower beds and called her a “bitch” through a gap in the fence. Pushing the civility envelope?
After returning from a trip out of town, Marija Andric of Maidenhead, saw her plants were dead. “I held a flower and it looked as if it was burned but it didn’t look as if it had been burned by the sun. I went to the kitchen to get some water and when I poured it onto the flowers some kind of foam seemed to come out of the ground like there had been some kind of poison or shampoo poured on it.” Andric suspects that her neighbor, Pamela Fox, threw bleach on the plants.
After this incident, Fox allegedly appeared at Andric’s door. ““She had a bottle of spray which she pointed in my face and she said, ‘You killed my flowers’.” Andric told the Reading Crown Court that Fox (real name) then lunged forward and bit off the end of Andric’s pinky. “The jury could plainly see the stump of her little finger on her right hand.” At which point Ms. Fox swooned and the judge called it a day.
Sure, gardening has its sinister side, along with a handy shed-full of rakes, rope, clippers, and snail bait. Look underneath that big brimmed hat and you’ll find a monster. Property and Pride are grinning, the shiny white uppers and lowers in the great jaw of Gardening. Keep your gloves on, neighbors, and fix that fence!
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