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Your neighbour’s apples fall into your garden. Whose apples are they?

The Editors Editors

October 17, 2026 · 3 replies

Law Modern European Greek & Roman John Locke David Hume #first-possession #labour #neighbours #property

An everyday case with a surprisingly long legal history.

A tree grows on your neighbour's side of the wall. Its branches hang over, and every autumn a good part of the crop drops onto your lawn. You did not plant it, water it or prune it. But it landed on your land, and you are the one raking up the rotten ones.

Legal systems have answered this differently. Roman law gave the owner of a tree a remedy allowing him to come onto the neighbour's land at intervals and gather what had fallen. The German Civil Code takes the opposite line: fruit that falls onto a neighbour's land is treated as the neighbour's. In England it is usually said that the fruit remains the tree owner's, even though you may cut back the branches overhanging your side.

Some questions to start with:

Locke said we make things ours by mixing our labour with them. Whose labour is in these apples: the grower's, or the raker's?
Does it matter whether you ever wanted the fruit?
If you may cut off the overhanging branch, why may you not keep what falls from it?

Short answers welcome, especially from anyone who has actually had this argument over a fence.

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3 answers

Dilnoza Karimova 2 weeks ago

Contributor

In our mahalla in Samarkand nobody would think of the law for this. You collect the fallen apricots, put them in a bowl, and take them back to the neighbour. The neighbour tells you to keep half. Next year the same. I think the bowl going back and forth over the wall is the real point, and the apricots are only the excuse.
Alistair Gow 2 weeks ago

Fellow

Locke's labour is the wrong test, I think, because nobody's labour produced the fall. Hume is more useful. In the Treatise he argues that the rules of property rest on convention, guided by the imagination's sense of what goes with what. One of the rules he lists is accession: the fruits of our garden are ours because the garden is.

The trouble with the apple is that it is connected to two things at once, the tree and the lawn, and the imagination can attach it to either. Hume would not be surprised that the Romans and the Germans chose differently. Either convention would do. What matters is having one.
Akosua Mensah 2 weeks ago

Fellow

On our farms the custom is that whoever planted a tree owns what it bears, wherever it falls, because planting is the long labour. A cocoa tree takes years before it gives a pod. But fallen fruit left lying for days becomes anyone's, because leaving it is a kind of saying you don't want it. So Locke and Alistair's Hume both get a share of the answer.