Couple win legal battle after neighbours used gnome to claim land

The matter ended up at tribunal where the squatters rights rule was used to prove the case

A couple have won a legal battle over a tiny strip of lawn outside their home after a neighbour tried to claim it by putting a garden gnome on the grass. Expert gardener Elizabeth Dobson and her partner Andrew Pleming had spent years tending the eight-by-three foot patch outside their home on Pointers Hill in Westcott, near Dorking, Surrey.

They mowed it, raked it, planted herbs and wildflowers and even let their children run across it as part of the garden, a tribunal heard. But the peaceful routine was upended when new neighbours Alison Unsted and Darren Unsted moved into the house next door in 2022 and decided the land was theirs.

Nine months later, the couple removed plants the gardeners had grown on the small patch and installed a garden gnome in their place. The move sparked a legal dispute over the tiny triangle of grass between the two properties, eventually reaching the Upper Tribunal in London. At the heart of the case was a legal principle known as adverse possession, or ‘squatters rights’, which allows someone to claim land if they have used it as their own for long enough.

Ms Dobson and Mr Pleming argued they, and the previous owners before them, had treated the disputed patch as part of their garden for years. They said they had mowed and maintained the grass just like the rest of their lawn, scarified the soil, replaced topsoil and introduced herbs and wildflowers.

Their children had played on it freely and the couple used the strip as a route to push a mower and wheelbarrow between levels of their garden, the tribunal heard. At one point they even embedded a sign with their house number in the soil. Several former tenants of the neighbouring property backed up their claim, telling the tribunal they had always assumed the patch belonged to number 29 and had never maintained it themselves.

The case was first heard by the First-tier Tribunal, which ruled the couple had only clearly taken possession of the land from around 2018 when they turned it into a flower bed, falling short of the ten years required. But the gardeners refused to give up and appealed. This week, Judge Elizabeth Cooke overturned the earlier decision at the Upper Tribunal, which sits at the Royal Courts of Justice. She ruled the couple had in fact demonstrated years of clear possession.

“The full picture is that, since the appellants bought the property, they have mowed, raked and scarified the lawn, replaced topsoil and turf, let their children play on the grass, used it to take the mower and barrow to the lower terrace, put a sign on it, and introduced herbs into the grass,” the judge said.

Looking at the nature of the small open-plan lawn, she said there was little more an owner could realistically do to show control of the land. “People do not generally mow their neighbour’s grass without their agreement,” she added. “Nor do they let their children play on it. Nor do they replace topsoil on it or plant herbs in it. Taken together it seems to me perfectly obvious that the appellants were in possession of the disputed land.”

The judge concluded the couple and their predecessors had been in possession of the strip since at least 2002, long before the Unsteds arrived and attempted to ‘repossess’ it with the garden gnome. She ordered that the couple’s application to register the land should now proceed as if the neighbour’s objection had never been made, bringing the row over a patch of grass barely bigger than a door to an end.