Trimming neighbour's palm tree that is over my wall

mrcheez

My neighbour has a palm tree in her back garden like the ones in this picture:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/eadaoinflynn/3318619701/in/photostream/lightbox/

but very developed in that it has about 8 branches of palm leaves coming out of it. About 4 of these branches are on or just over the wall separating our gardens.

I have a pretty constant problem with palm leaves littering my tiny garden, and I regularly have to remove them every 2 days throughout the year, not to mention one of the branches is now in contact with my cherry blossom tree, so I plan to cut off the branches that are overhanging into my garden (obviously I'll let me neighbour know about it before).

My questions are:
- Some of the branches are practically ON the mid-way point of the wall between my garden and the neighbour's, can I still cut this part off, or does it have to be PAST the wall and hanging into my garden? (The leaves themselves are in over the wall into my garden, it's just the branch they are hanging from is on the wall line, not over the wall)

- Is there anything I need to be aware of when cutting off palm branches so that I don't damage the rest of the tree? I'm just going to use one of those extensible tree pruners.
I plan to chop it off in stages so as not to damage my plants growing beside the wall underneath, rather than cutting the whole thing from the base as I'd say the lot is about 40kg at least.

_Brian

I think your best ask them to prune it back, I'm not sure they respond well to cutting back and you could cause damage.

Funny, I like them and wouldn't be offended by one growing across the wall, I also can't imagine it creates much mess, would you not be out tidying leaves and weeds anyway ?

mrcheez

Each leaf is just under a metre long it creates a hell of a mess since about 10 fall per day at the moment.

I don't clear up leaves/weeds as the garden is low-maintenance as per the way I've designed it, so have no weeds and just use the garden vacuum on the leaves once every 3 months or so.

So pruning back basically means cutting off the leaves down to the root?

_Brian

I wouldn't be confident on pruning that palm without damaging the whole plant and probably neighbor relations too.

I still it would be best speak to the neighbor and ask them to deal with it, at least that way if it dies you won't be blamed.

Bicycle

Those are cordylines and they can be quite sensitive. I have them in my garden and I wouldn't trim them.

Speak to your neighbour. See if you can come to some agreement.

BabySlam

On the point you started with, OP, it seems logical that the mid-way point of the wall marks the boundary between the neighbour's property and your own.