Gardner sues ex-lover solicitor for £200,000 over 'slash and burn' attack on ...

A keen gardener who claims her lawyer ex-boyfriend trashed her flowerbeds after they split up is now suing him in a £200,000 court fight.

Greenfingered Patricia Langley, 71, claims her solicitor ex-partner Lucian Milburn was behind a post-breakup 'slash and burn' attack on her garden in the Camden flat that they once shared. 

Mr Milburn, 72, denies destroying his former lover's flowers and plants, which she says she had lovingly cultivated in her front garden for more than a decade.

But Ms Langley is now suing her ex at Central London County Court for £200,000 over wrongful interference with her plants, restriction of access to the garden and a series of breaches of his obligations as freeholder of the building in which the flat is.

The court heard how the couple had been in a relationship for 'many years' and in 2001 had bought a second floor flat in Camden Road, of which Mr Milburn was the freeholder. 

They separated in 2011 and Mr Milburn later moved into another flat in the basement of the house with his new partner.

Ms Langley says that, in 2015, her ex then tried to ban her from the communal front garden of the flats and soon afterwards she found flowers and plants she had maintained for years destroyed.

'I came out and found the front garden like a slash and burn, with the exception of Mr Milburn's favourite plants: the peonies, the geraniums,' she said.

'All my plants had been ripped up and torn up. Some of them might even have to have been dug up.

'The plantings he was fond of weren't touched. The gardenias weren't touched.

'It was indescribable, the destruction of what was a well-maintained garden... It was an act of dismemberment in effigy of my person.'

Although she didn't directly accuse him of physically pulling up the flowers

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