Nurse gets restraining order for 'obsessive hedge cutting'

A nurse who made her neighbours' lives hell by her "obsessive hedge cutting" has received a restraining order. For three years Susan Sheldrick, 45, tormented her wealthy neighbours with a bizarre campaign of manic gardening that went on from dawn until dusk. Over the years she reduced the height of the dividing front hedge by five feet and the back one by six, shouting: "We can see you now!"

Sheldrick and her businessman husband Nigel, 49, were found guilty of harassment after shattering the peace in the neighbourhood where they lived in a £425,000 detached house. Magistrates heard how a dispute with their next door neighbours, company boss Justin Jackson and his wife Heather, culminated in Sheldrick using strimmers and shears to lop down the hedge, inch by inch, in the middle of the night.



The campaign of harassment also included Nigel Sheldrick and their sons vacuuming the family car at 1am, shouting abuse and Mrs Sheldrick singing loudly under their neighbours' window late at night. Tension between the well-to-do residents in Harrogate, North Yorks, began when the Jacksons applied to extend their five-bedroom bungalow to build an orangery.

Harrogate magistrates' court heard that things turned uglier after the Sheldricks' giant schnauzer escaped into the Jacksons' garden and pinned their daughter to her front door. The couple were handed an indefinite restraining order, forbidding the Sheldricks from harassing their neighbours - and limiting hedge cutting to once a month between 8am and 4pm. They denied causing a problem and will appeal. They also plan to move to a small-holding in Lincolnshire.