The neighbour's tree hangs over my garden: what the law says in four countries
Italy, France, Germany and Spain all let you cut invading roots yourself and all stop you cutting the branches — except Germany, which lets you cut them after a deadline. The planting-distance rules behind them are four different systems.
The problem
The tree next door is planted right on the boundary. Its branches hang over the garden and drop leaves into the gutter, its roots are lifting the path, and the neighbour has been asked to cut it back for two years and has not. The obvious thing to do is get a saw out, and in three of these four countries that is the one thing you may not do.
What they agree on
All four codes draw the same line, in almost the same words, between what is above ground and what is below it. Roots that come into your land you may cut yourself. Branches that hang over it you may not simply cut: you have a claim to make the owner cut them. Italy's art. 896 lets you compel the neighbour to cut the branches and lets you cut the roots; France's art. 673 says exactly the same and adds brambles and twigs to the roots; Spain's art. 592 gives a right to "reclamar que se corten" against branches and to cut roots "por sí mismo dentro de su heredad". The reason is the same everywhere: cutting a root is work done in your own soil, while cutting a branch means operating over someone else's tree.
None of the four gives you the tree. The remedy is cutting back to the boundary, not felling, and none of these articles lets a neighbour demand a general prune, a reduction in height, or the removal of a tree standing at a lawful distance. Nor do they award damages. A gutter blocked by leaves, a lifted paving slab, a cracked pipe: in Italy that is art. 2043, in Spain art. 1902, in Germany §§ 823 ff. or a neighbour-law compensation claim. The encroachment article and the damage claim are two separate things in all four systems.
The three that set planting distances all subordinate their own numbers to local rules first. Italy: "le distanze stabilite dai regolamenti e, in mancanza, dagli usi locali". France: "les règlements particuliers actuellement existants, ou... des usages constants et reconnus". Spain: "la distancia autorizada por las ordenanzas o la costumbre del lugar". The figures in the code apply only where nothing local says otherwise, which is why measuring before reading the municipal by-law is the wrong order in all three. And in all four, tree-protection and nature-conservation law can restrict when and whether anything may be cut at all, whatever the civil code permits.
Where they part company
| Jurisdiction | What its law does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Italia | Fallen fruit is allocated three ways. Italy: fruit that falls naturally from overhanging branches belongs to the owner of the land it falls on unless local custom says otherwise — and where custom gives it to the tree's owner, collecting it goes through the access rules of art. 843. France: the same rule, flat, with no local-custom exception. Germany: the same rule again but in a different provision, § 911 (Überfall), which excepts neighbouring land serving public use. Spain's art. 592 is silent. | The word doing the work in Italy and France is "naturally". Fruit that falls is yours; fruit shaken down or picked off the branch is not, and that is the line a reader with an olive or lemon tree over the fence actually needs. |
| The three planting-distance rules classify plants by three different criteria. Italy classifies by the tree and names species: three metres for alberi di alto fusto, with noci, castagni, querce, pini, cipressi, olmi, pioppi and platani listed in the text; one and a half metres for trees whose trunk rises no more than three metres before branching; half a metre for vines, shrubs, live hedges and fruit trees up to two and a half metres — with one metre for alder or chestnut coppice hedges and two metres for robinia. France classifies by height alone: two metres for plantings over two metres tall, half a metre for the rest. Spain uses two blunt categories, árboles altos at two metres and arbustos o árboles bajos at fifty centimetres, and leaves what counts to evidence. | The same shrub can be lawful in one system and unlawful in another on identical facts. And in France compliance is not fixed once: a shrub planted at fifty centimetres is in order until the day it passes two metres, at which point the required distance changes underneath it. | |
| Italy fixes the measurement at a moment in time — "dalla linea del confine alla base esterna del tronco dell'albero nel tempo della piantagione, o dalla linea stessa al luogo dove fu fatta la semina". What matters is where the tree was put, not how wide it has grown. | It shifts the whole dispute onto a historical fact. When the tree was planted, and where its trunk stood then, is a matter of evidence — old photographs, land records, the previous owner — and it can decide a case that looks obvious on a tape measure today. | |
| Two of the three distance rules switch off entirely at a wall. Italy: the distances need not be observed where a dividing wall stands on the boundary, whether owned or common, provided the plants are kept no higher than the top of it. France: espaliers may go against either side of the party wall with no distance at all, must not exceed its crest, and where the wall is not mitoyen only its owner may use it. Spain has no wall exception. | In Italy and France a wall converts an unlawful planting into a lawful one and back again as the plant grows past the coping. In Spain the wall changes nothing, and the two-metre and fifty-centimetre figures apply regardless. | |
| France | France writes the time point into the article: "Le droit de couper les racines, ronces et brindilles ou de faire couper les branches des arbres, arbustes ou arbrisseaux est imprescriptible." Italy gets there with different words, art. 896 allowing the neighbour to compel cutting "in qualunque tempo". Spain's art. 592 says nothing at all about time. | Thirty years of tolerating an overhang does not cost a French or Italian neighbour the right to object. And in France the contrast is written into the code itself: the thirty-year prescription protects a plantation set too close under art. 672, but never protects the overhang under art. 673. |
| Deutschland | Germany is the only one of the four that lets you cut the branches yourself — and it makes you earn it. § 910(1) sentence 2 gives the same right as for roots only where the owner has set the possessor of the neighbouring land a reasonable deadline for removal and nothing has happened within it. Cutting without setting that deadline falls outside the paragraph. | It is the practical difference that decides what a homeowner may actually do next weekend. In Italy, France and Spain the answer is a demand and, if refused, a claim. In Germany the answer is a dated letter, a wait, and then the saw. |
| Germany is also the only one with a threshold. § 910(2): the right does not exist at all if the roots or branches do not impair the use of the land. Something must actually be interfering — paving lifted, a pipe damaged, a bed shaded, a path blocked — not merely crossing the line. | In Italy, France and Spain the encroachment is the wrong; nothing has to be broken. A German neighbour who simply dislikes the look of an overhang has no claim under § 910, and the argument moves onto whether the interference is real. | |
| § 910(1) says the owner may cut the roots "und behalten" — cut them and keep them. None of the other three allocates the cuttings. | It settles a small argument that comes up constantly: the material is yours, it need not be handed back, and equally it may not be thrown over the fence. The German page also notes that the right stops at the boundary and does not include entering the neighbour's land, which the Länder neighbour-law statutes deal with separately. | |
| The BGB contains no planting-distance rule. Where Italy, France and Spain each pair an encroachment article with a distance article, Germany has § 910 alone; how far from the boundary a tree may be planted is left to the neighbour-law statutes of the individual Länder. | It means there is no single German answer to "how close may he plant it", and a comparison that stopped at the civil codes would report a gap where there is in fact sixteen different rules. It is also why Germany appears here with one provision and the other three appear with two. | |
| España | Spain draws the boundary of the self-help right in the text: roots may be cut "por sí mismo dentro de su heredad" — inside your own land. France sets the same limit as "à la limite de la ligne séparative". Italy's art. 896 states no such limit but subjects the whole right to "i regolamenti e gli usi locali". | In Spain and France the article itself tells you where to stop digging, and undermining the tree from the neighbour's side is outside the permission. In Italy the answer may be found in a local custom or a municipal green-space regulation rather than in the code, which is why the Italian page advises checking whether an established local usage exists before assuming the general rule. |
| Only Spain writes the remedy for a badly placed tree into the same article, and it is the harshest one: "todo propietario tiene derecho a pedir que se arranquen los árboles que en adelante se plantaren a menor distancia" — uprooting, not pruning, and only for plantings made from then on. Italy's art. 892 states distances and no sanction; France's art. 671 likewise, with removal and the exceptions to it held back to art. 672. | "En adelante" is the whole of it. Spanish law offers the strongest remedy against a new planting and, on the face of this article, none at all against a tree that has stood at half a metre for forty years. A reader whose complaint is about an old tree is reading the wrong provision. |
The provision in each country
Each card links to the page that reproduces the official text and explains it in that country's own language.
Italia Codice Civile
- Art. 896 Codice Civile You may compel the neighbour to cut overhanging branches at any time and may cut invading roots yourself, subject to local regulations and customs; naturally fallen fruit belongs to the land it falls on.
- Art. 892 Codice Civile Three metres for tall trees, one and a half for lower ones, half a metre for shrubs and hedges — measured from the trunk as it stood when planted, and disapplied where a dividing wall on the boundary is not overtopped.
France Code civil
- Art. 673 Code civil Branches: you may compel the neighbour to cut them. Roots, brambles and twigs: you may cut them yourself at the boundary line. Naturally fallen fruit is yours, and the right is imprescriptible.
- Art. 671 Code civil Two metres from the boundary for plantings taller than two metres and half a metre for the rest, unless a local regulation or established usage says otherwise; espaliers against a party wall need no distance but may not pass its crest.
Deutschland BGB
España Código Civil
- Artículo 592 del Código Civil Against branches extending over your land you may demand that they be cut; against roots entering your soil you may cut them yourself, but only within your own land.
- Artículo 591 del Código Civil Two metres for tall trees and fifty centimetres for shrubs and low trees, unless local ordinances or custom provide otherwise — with a right to demand the uprooting of what is planted too close from now on.
Where there is no answer in the code
A jurisdiction listed here is a finding, not a gap. Either its answer lives outside the corpus — special legislation, case law, municipal rules — or its law simply has no such rule.
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United Kingdom
The courts answer it
Abatement: common-law self-help
Cutting back an overhanging branch in England and Wales is abatement, a common-law right of self-help. There is no section on it, so there is nothing to reproduce verbatim and nothing to compare. A lookup over the Acts this section carries answers with the statutory nuisance regime of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, which does not reach overhanging vegetation.
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California
The courts answer it
Abatement, at common law
Self-help abatement is common law in California too. The corpus does hold a real and closely related section — Civil Code § 3346, which has its own page — but it answers the opposite question: the damages, potentially trebled, payable by someone who injures a neighbour's tree. It is what you consult before cutting, not the authority to cut.
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New York
The courts answer it
Nothing statutory. The New York corpus behind these pages covers the Domestic Relations, General Obligations, Partnership and Real Property Laws, and none of them contains an encroaching-vegetation provision; the lookup returned nothing rather than stretching a section that was there.
That's the law in seven places. Now let's settle your problem.
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This page compares provisions of several legal systems in general terms and links to the official text of each. It is not legal advice, it does not tell you which country's law governs your situation, and it takes no account of the circumstances of your case. For a live dispute, consult a qualified lawyer in the jurisdiction concerned.