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It is always best to try to get along with your neighbors, but some people can make that really difficult with unpredictable behavior.

What would you do if your neighbors were sometimes really nice and other times really mean, and now you have found that they keep planting solar flowers in your garden?

That is what is happening to the couple in this story, and they aren’t sure how they should deal with the situation. They don’t want so many solar flowers, but they also don’t want to upset the neighbors by telling them to stop.

Honestly, I think they need to just have a conversation with them and ask them nicely to remove the solar flowers. If they take it poorly, that is on them. Check out the full story below and see what you think they should do.

Don’t accept gifts from crazy people

I moved into a neighborhood a few years back.

Whoa, what happened?

Next door neighbors acted nice enough (wife offering to help with my garden, husband telling my husband (DH) “we should watch football together sometime!”).

A few weeks after moving in, DH was reading on the couch in front of our front window when neighbor wife drives fast into her own driveway, honks repeatedly until DH looks out the window, and proceeds to flip him off screaming “**** YOU!!!” over and over out the car window.

This neighbor is unhinged.

Since we have kids and pets and I didn’t want this escalating any further, I sent her a letter and a FB message saying “Idk what we’ve done to you except try to be good neighbors. Why are you angry? I’d like to sit down and talk this out like adults so we’re not just on eggshells for all time.”

She responded saying “Sorry I did that. It was uncalled for.” No explanation.

It is nice to inform them that the fence will be replaced.

Both she and her husband actively avoided talking or even looking at us for over a year.

Finally I reached out to inform them we (myself and DH) were paying a landscaping company to replace the dilapidated fence between our backyards (on our side of property line), as her dogs were routinely breaking holes in the fence and coming into our yard.

We didn’t ask them for a dime because we wanted no input on who to contract or color/material, etc.

Hey, maybe they can be friends after all.

After the new fence was put up, the wife started acting weirdly nice, like coming over uninvited to help my toddler build a snowman, talking to my baby, etc.

She offered my toddler some faux flower solar garden lights that “my dumb friend gave me and I don’t want them, maybe your kids would like some?”

She has no concept of boundaries.

I thought maybe this was supposed to be an act of goodwill and told toddler she could go pick one. She placed it in one of my flowerpots to get some sun.

I thought that was the end of it. But now, I keep finding new and different solar flowers in various places. Neighbor wife has taken free license to move around, add and replace the solar flowers around my yard whenever she wants.

What a weird situation.

If I move or take out a flower, she lets me know “I saw that you took that flower away… what did you decide to do with it?”

DH says “Just throw all the flowers away and put an end to it.”

Why not just tell the neighbor to stop doing this?

I just don’t want to start another cold war with neighbor wife over these dumb flowers.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a homeowner who doesn’t care whether or not their neighbors hate their yard flamingos, because they aren’t subject to the HOA.

The nonconfrontational part of me is like “just take them out for winter and next spring say I ‘lost them’.”

She can’t let the neighbors ruin her desire to go outside.

I’m used to having amazing and sweet neighbors and I just hate how erratic and unpredictable this one couple is.

Sometimes it makes me not want to go outside.

It can be hard to confront a neighbor like this, and it will definitely be awkward. That being said, if it is done nicely, it is possible that she will just stop.

The one commenter on this story wondered about cameras pointing into the yard. This seems like a really good idea to me. Get the cameras installed while still on good terms with the neighbors, just in case something goes wrong.