I caught the people behind us cutting down some of our trees soon after they moved in. Our rural country subdivision was built on a former farm and has lots of those old stone walls with big trees that used to run along the edges of the fields throughout. The rock wall and tree line runs along the back of our yard but about 10-15 feet inside our property line. There are orange survey steaks at the corners of our yard but I guess the new folks did not see them or couldn't look in a straight line from one corner to the other. I was at home one weekday when I heard a chainsaw. I figured somebody was cutting up a load of firewood. Then I heard a tree fall. I walked out to the back of our property and found the new homeowner, whom I hadn't met previously, cutting all the maple trees down up to our rock wall. Thankfully he hadn't got to the really big trees yet. He kept saying 'all my land'! His English was not very good but I managed to explain where our property line was. I gave him a photocopy of the survey of our and the surrounding properties showing the rock wall and the property lines were. He apologized and that fall he planted a double row of pine trees that give us more privacy than the maple trees did in the winter. Since then many maple saplings have also grown in and we can no longer see the house behind us. Those people moved out a couple of years later maybe to somewhere with a bigger yard!
~Diane