We not only have the tortured bush topiaries in everyone’s lawn around here, we have at least one neighbor who keeps reporting us to the lawn police for not joining them and having a contract with one of the lawn services. Every goddam morning hordes of exploited immigrants arrive in big trucks, fan out, and start up their leaf blowers. It sounds like an invasion of wasps and ruins sleep for anyone not on a “wake up at 7:30” schedule.
Our yard looks like this:
Neighboring yards look like this:
When the town code enforcement officers (aka the Lawn Police) receive a complaint, they go to the address reported and look for anything they can write the property owners up for; it isn’t against code to not have your plant life turned into giant replicas of plastic Monopoly™ tokens, but they write us up for having LEAVES in our yard or they photograph the stems of our day lilies and irises and refer to them as grass that’s taller than you’re allowed to have your grass. Wrote us up once for not having a tarp over our woodpile in our back yard.