There aren’t a whole lot of people who are excited to live in a neighborhood with an HOA. In fact, only the people on the HOA board really enjoy it, I suspect.

OP is an attorney who was taken by surprise when someone showed up asking whether or not their HOA contract actually forbade planted sunflowers.

Client walks into the office and asks us for a contract review. He then hands over an HOA contract. Before slogging through a whole HOA contract, I asked him what he was hoping to accomplish.

“They want me to dig up my sunflowers.”

“Your… sunflowers?”

“Yes, I planted a row of sunflowers outside my house. They pranced by and said that sunflowers are not allowed per the contract I signed. So I want you to tell me if that is true or not.”

“Sir, before anything else I need to tell you that this will likely be an hourly fee bill. HOAs are notorious for dragging things out. So these could quickly become expensive sunflowers.”

“I don’t care. This is America and I should be able to plant sunflowers.”

After getting a retainer up front, the attorney reviewed the contract and learned that many plants are not allowed, named specifically, and figured some over-eager attorney wrote the thing.

Still thinking he wasn’t that serious about sunflowers, I asked for a three hour retainer. He immediately pulled out a checkbook and paid for four hours. So I buckled down to review the alleged anti-sunflower clause.

Just for reference, the sunflowers he wanted to plant were really big (5ft) and all along the front of the house. It was a very substantial amount of sunflowers.

The contract did indeed contain a clause, with a very thorough list, on which plants were and were not allowed to be planted. The list had just about every plant I could think of, in alphabetical order (think apple, banana, cauliflower, dill…). Sunflowers included. Corn was not included, which becomes very important later.

Quick legal point – if you write ‘no dogs allowed’ it is normally assumed that you are talking about all dogs generally. If you write ‘no labs, golden retrievers, or poodles allowed’ it is normally assumed that all other dogs are allowed.

Sometimes a not great attorney will write a super long list to pad hours (read: charge more) instead of just writing ‘no plants without prior approval’ or something.

When he called the man to give him the bad news, he happened to mention that corn was not on the list – which seemed to make the guy’s day.

I called the client back in for the bad news. In explaining the above legal point, I let him know that the HOA got a raw deal from whoever drafted the contract.

“No can do on the sunflowers. But if it makes you feel any better they were probably over billed by whoever wrote this contract. Pretty shoddy work too, they even forgot to write down ‘corn’ but they included nonsense like ‘dragon fruit’.”

“So yes to corn, no to sunflowers?”

“I didn’t really check the contract for corn. But its not prohibited in the plant section, so probably?”

“Excellent. That’ll work.”

I thought he was oddly happy with bad news.

Later, he learned his client planted a whole bunch of ugly corn where the sunflowers had been and ended up winning the day that way.

Then two or three weeks later he came in with a picture of his house, surrounded by huge sunflowers.

What happened? This guy drove out to the country and bought obnoxiously large and ugly cornstalks. He promptly planted them where the sunflowers had been.

When confronted by the HOA he told them (paraphrasing) to suck it the contract lets me plant corn.

Then after some negotiation he agreed to take the corn down, in exchange for permission to plant sunflowers.

Now, they’re even friends.

Now we are friends, he is still a great client, and he lives surrounded by a ridiculous moat of sunflowers.

Are there any HOA supporters on Reddit? Let’s find out!

The top commenter has a foolproof way to get the HOA to leave you alone.

Look out grass, you’re next.

Sometimes semantics are everything.

It’s not often that lawyers get compliments on Reddit.

This is a good tale of success against the HOA.

Don’t let the man keep you down.