It isn’t every day that your phone rings and it is a reporter from the Daily Telegraph and you tell them about being hit by a broomstick!
That’s what happened to our new expert, Luke Hamill.
Luke runs a thriving arboriculture (trees and stuff) and ground maintenance business up in Yorkshire.
Greg spotted a request from a journalist looking for expert advice on hedge disputes.
So, after texting Luke to check he wasn’t up a tree and COULD help if the reporter was keen, Greg pitched him as the go-to-guru on all things hedges.
Here’s the request:
“I Think this may be my most random request ever but are there any gardening, or more specifically, hedge experts on here who could talk with me about the do’s and don’ts of hedge maintenance & etiquette?”
At the time Luke and his team were on a development site for a major housebuilder, checking for diseased Ash trees and to assess strike distances from the plots.
Then the phone rang.
Georgina introduced herself and explained that earlier in the month “property tycoon”, Mark Dyer and his wife, Clare, were defeated in a three year legal dispute over the 26ft hedge next to the helipad at their house in Surrey.
As Georgina explained, the neighbours claimed it had turned their idyllic hamlet into a “battlefield”.
They aren’t the only ones either, it turns out that the author JK Rowling has come into strife with her neighbours after carrying out routine maintenance on the leylandii hedge next to her £2.2 million home in Edinburgh.
Luke told Georgina that he has found himself in the middle of numerous arguments between neighbours and was even once hit with a broomstick by one angry resident.
“Some of the most common issues seem to be over sunlight and shade and sometimes we are called out to work on a property only to find the property owner knows nothing about it and that it’s a court order,” Luke told Georgina.
You can read the full article here or just ask Luke about it, especially the broomstick bit – how very apt for a story involving J K Rowling!
PS we didn’t let that be the end of it. We have since created blogs and social posts for Luke that link back to the article so that the PR exposure is properly leveraged. Never let the story just wither on the vine – however good you are at pruning.