A messy garden is a glorious garden. We need to stop tidying, titivating and paving them over | Emma Beddington

I’ve just watched another of my neighbours rip up everything green and growing around their home.

It’s enough to make David Attenborough weep

It’s noisy outside.

I forget over winter how loud the garden gets when the imperatives of shagging, fighting for territory, then raising babies become urgent – the sparrows are kicking off, the tits are fighting a turf war and competing wood pigeons are cooing to seduce Susan, the escaped wedding dove who lives on our roof.

When I sat in the sun yesterday, the industrious buzz of bees tackling the dregs of cherry blossom was lawnmower-loud, accompanied by “back off” peeps from blackbirds nesting in the ivy.

There was another noise too, though: the rumble of a mini-digger ripping up a nearby garden.

They started with the hedge – I thought, actually, that was all they were going to do, because it happens around here a lot.

It would have been the third case I’ve spotted in a matter of weeks.

The first was proudly pointed out to me by the owner; the second I only saw in the aftermath – a bare row of jagged stumps where there used to be dense leaves.

But this time, I realised they had bigger plans: when the hedge was out, they kept digging, clearing away bushes, plants, trees, every inch of anything that ever lived there.

By evening, all that remained was a scraped-back trench of bare earth and a skip full of uprooted branches, skeins of ivy, clumps of grass.

In the space of one beautiful warm April day, what used to be a garden is not any more.