Homeowner Maliciously Complies When City Asks Them To Take Better Care Of Their Gardens

Living in society comes with a lot of rules, but sometimes those rules are pretty dumb. Especially when it involves the government trying to meddle with your gardens like the one in this epic story posted by u/IamasimpforObi-Wan in Reddit’s popular Malicious Compliance subreddit.

If you’re not familiar, Malicious Compliance is conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request. That’s exactly what this person did for the city after they said their garden was “interfering” with the safety of the street.

I’ll let the story speak for itself. Here’s what the Original Poster (OP) had to say:

“The city wanted me to take better care of my gardens, so I had them approved by the local nature conservation association”

My house is surrounded by two gardens, one in the front, facing the street, and one in the back, bordering my neighbors’ gardens. When my parents and grandparents moved into our house 26 years ago, they planted a thick hedge around the entire property. They also installed a rose arch over the pathway to our front door and my grandfather was always busy keeping up the garden, planting, weeding, and keeping everything very tidy.

My grandfather died in 2002 and after that, the garden was neglected for a few years as my parents were still working and my brother and I were in university/school. But then, ca. 2005, my mom read something that we should plant stuff to help the bees and she took over the gardens, planting lilac, rhododendron, roses, and various berries. Later, we decided to also install raised garden beds with various kitchen herbs.

My mom is now over 70 years old and has officially given the house over to my brother and me so that we won’t be taxed on inheriting it when she dies. Since then, I’ve been sporadically taking care of the gardens. I like them in their wild shape with all the birds, bees, bumblebees, and butterflies flying around, in autumn we get hedgehogs and we’ve been visited by a fox recently (which send my cats into a panic).

Then, recently, we received a letter from the city stating that our garden was interfering with the safety of the street because the hedge was overgrowing the pavement and contained poisonous berries which were a danger to children. Now, my brother trims the hedge every month to make sure nothing is overgrowing the pavement in any way, and while the berries are poisonous, to get to them you’d have to be quite resilient because they’re surrounded by thorns. They are also known to be an ideal food for some local birds.

So, I contacted our local nature conservation association and asked if they would like to have a look at our gardens and maybe tell us if we could improve anything to make them even more nature friendly. They came, looked around and then told us they rarely see gardens so in touch with nature. They approved our gardens as “especially nature friendly” and contacted the city to tell them that from their point of view, any changes would be considered unfriendly to nature, and since our city prides itself with once being one of the “green capitals” in our country, they had to budge.

Don’t mess with my gardens!

Commenters responded, applauding the way the OP handled this situation, while many shared similar stories: