“The council came at 5am and took our garden away”
In May 2020, we woke up at 8am and saw a text from a neighbour saying ‘where is your garden?’, and it had just disappeared. My partner put up posters saying ‘missing garden’. Then we discovered the council had come at 5am and taken it away. They took it to the public waste disposal centre (who luckily watered it and took care of it). A week later, our neighbours organised a party, and they brought so many flowers we were able to start a new garden.
We discovered that if you put your garden on a hand cart it’s allowed to be on the street, which is written in some obscure 150-year-old law. So we got back our old garden, put it on the hand cart and walked it home through the streets of Brussels. We paid a ticket – €28 for the whole year. We haven’t really heard from the council, they can’t do anything any more.
