When mowing the lawn can change who owns your land 

Most people never give a second thought to the exact position of their garden boundary. A strip of grass gets mown, a few flowers get planted, and life carries on. But when neighbours have treated a piece of land as belonging to one property for years, sometimes decades, those everyday assumptions can eventually change the legal ownership of the land. A recent Property Tribunal decision shows how. 

How the dispute arose 

The case of Dobson & Anor v Unsted & Anor, concerned a small triangle of front garden between two houses on Westcott Hill in Dorking. On the title plan, it belonged to number 27. For decades, nobody treated it that way. Successive owners of number 29 mowed it, planted flowers on it, cleared the autumn leaves from it, and let their children play on it. From 2009, that fell to Elizabeth Dobson and Andrew Pleming, who simply carried on as their predecessors had, alongside the rest of their front garden. The owners of number 27 made no attempt to maintain or assert ownership over it. 

Nobody raised the point until 2022, when the neighbouring house changed hands. The following year, the new owners cleared the strip of its planting and placed a garden gnome on it, a deliberate, symbolic act of reclaiming the land. Ms Dobson and Mr Pleming responded by applying to HM Land Registry to be registered as the legal owners, on the basis that they had treated the land as their own for long enough to claim it through adverse possession, the legal principle sometimes called squatter’s rights. 

Why the law allows this at all 

It can seem strange that someone could simply acquire land that belongs, on paper, to someone else. The principle exists because the law ultimately favours certainty over history. Where a person has treated land as their own, openly, without permission, and with the intention of possessing it, for a sustained period, and the true owner has done nothing to assert their rights or object, the law will in time recognise the reality on the ground rather than insist on the reality on paper. It is a doctrine built for exactly this kind of case, where ownership and occupation have quietly drifted apart and nobody has noticed, or minded, until now. 

Why the claim failed, then succeeded 

The claim was rejected by the First-tier Tribunal. The judge treated each of the couple’s activities on the strip in isolation and found each one wanting. Mowing the grass, taken by itself, looked like nothing more than being a considerate neighbour. Children playing on the land proved very little. Only the flower bed planted in 2018 was treated as a clear enough act of ownership to count, and that left the couple several years short of the ten years normally required to succeed when the land is already registered. 

The Upper Tribunal overturned that approach, and its reasoning is the real substance of the case. Judge Elizabeth Cooke concluded that the First-tier Tribunal had approached the evidence in the wrong way. Rather than looking at each act in isolation, it should have considered what those acts demonstrated collectively over time. No single act needs to prove ownership by itself. What matters is whether, taken as a whole over the relevant period, the pattern of behaviour points consistently to one reality, that everyone involved was acting as though the land belonged to one particular household. Mowing, tidying, planting, children playing, even a house number sign, none of it decisive alone, but taken together over more than twenty years it built an unmistakable picture. Everyone behaved as though the land formed part of number 29’s garden. Nobody behaved as though it belonged to number 27. 

The judge added a second point that matters just as much. What amounts to factual possession depends on the nature of the land itself. Nobody expects a fence around an open-plan front lawn on a street where none of the gardens are fenced and requiring one would be asking a homeowner to do something entirely out of place. For an ordinary strip of front lawn, mowing it and keeping it tidy is exactly what an owner would do, and so this is conduct which demonstrates an intention to possess the land, rather than being dismissed as nothing more than neighbourly tidiness. 

On that basis, the appeal succeeded. The tribunal found that the couple, and their predecessors before them, had been in possession of the strip since at least 2002, comfortably clearing the ten-year threshold. The garden gnome became the headline, but legally it was irrelevant. By the time it appeared in 2023, the tribunal found that decades of occupation had already settled the matter. The lesson is not that a gnome cannot mark ownership, but that a symbolic gesture made after years of inaction is unlikely to reverse years of established occupation. 

The point many homeowners miss 

There is a wider lesson here that has nothing to do with gnomes or lawnmowers. Many homeowners assume that the red line on their Land Registry title plan marks the exact legal boundary of their property, down to the inch. It does not. Land Registry plans generally show only the approximate position of a boundary, not its precise legal line, and where genuine uncertainty exists, the way land has actually been occupied and used on the ground can become critically important in working out who owns what. 

It is surprisingly common for neighbours to inherit assumptions made by previous owners. A fence may have been built in the wrong place decades earlier. A strip of grass may simply have been maintained by one household because it looked like part of their garden. Over time, those practical arrangements become accepted as the status quo, even where the title documents say something different. Once an arrangement like that is accepted, people tend to stop questioning it. It may only be when a property is sold, or a boundary is challenged years later, that anyone realises the legal position may not match what everyone assumed. That is precisely the gap that allowed this dispute to arise, and it is worth any homeowner bearing in mind long before a dispute of their own occurs. 

What to do depending on your circumstances 

If you own land that a neighbour has been quietly using, whether that is a verge, a corner of a driveway, a strip of lawn, or a whole field, the safest course is to address it directly and put something in writing, even informally. A written agreement confirming that the use is with your permission will usually prevent the occupation being treated as adverse, and it costs a good deal less than a tribunal hearing. 

If you are the one using land that technically belongs to a neighbour, it is worth resisting the assumption that years of use automatically means it is yours. The legal test remains genuinely strict, and as the first decision in this case shows, tribunals do not always accept that ordinary use is enough. What persuaded the Upper Tribunal was not one dramatic act but years of consistent behaviour showing that the land was being treated as part of one property, and that kind of case is only won with clear, well-evidenced history. 

If you are buying a property, look at what is actually happening on the ground, not just what the title plan shows. A neighbour mowing part of what should be your garden, or a boundary that does not quite match the paperwork, is worth investigating properly before you exchange contracts, not after. 

The same applies in reverse if you are selling. A buyer’s solicitor may notice that the title plan does not match what is actually being occupied, and that mismatch can hold up a sale until it is resolved. Sorting out an informal boundary arrangement before a property goes on the market is far simpler than trying to untangle it mid-transaction. 

Cases like Dobson v Unsted are never really about a garden gnome or a flower bed. They arise because neighbours make assumptions that go unchallenged for years, and by the time those assumptions are tested, the legal position may be very different from what either side expected. Taking advice early can often prevent a minor boundary uncertainty from becoming a costly and time-consuming dispute, and Coodes’ Personal Disputes team would be glad to talk through where you stand. 

About the Author: Poppy Pain joined Coodes in July 2023 and works within the Dispute Resolution team, assisting across a wide range of personal disputes. Poppy carries out legal research to support the team’s lawyers and prepares legal documents, including instructions to counsel and court applications, for a variety of disputes. She is closely involved in trial preparation, corresponding with the courts and compiling bundles of documents for hearings. Poppy works closely with Darren Higginson, a 25 years’ qualified property Partner in the Personal Disputes team, and Emily Stark, a 11 years’ experienced property Solicitor in the Personal Disputes team, who both specialise in these types of matters. 

Get in Touch: poppy.pain@coodes.co.uk or 01872 246 216