But there are two gardens next to each other. You have to picture how they’re laid out. One garden is at a higher level. Then there’s a little cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff there’s another garden that continues to protrude. Picture a horizontal line, with a garden on top of it. Then there’s a drop-off—a vertical line downward—and another horizontal line in the same direction, where there’s a second garden. So there are two gardens on different levels.
Now picture the vertical wall between them. There’s a vegetable growing out of that wall. Its roots are in the ground of the upper garden, but the plant itself is hanging over the lower garden. So who owns the vegetables?
Rabbi Meir says the vegetables belong to the owner of the upper garden. They’re nourished from his earth. They’re gaining the nutrients they need to live from his earth. Therefore, they belong to the upper garden. While Rabbi Yehuda says, “No, they’re in the airspace of the lower garden. Therefore, they’re the property of the lower garden.”
Rabbi Meir says that if the owner of the upper garden wanted to remove all the dirt from under his garden to make it level with the lower garden, then there would be no vegetable there. Since it’s within his actual earth, within his dirt, anything grown in his dirt would be his. So that’s the opinion of Rabbi Meir.
Rabbi Yehuda tells him, “I’ll tell you the opposite: the owner of the lower garden owns it.” Why? If the owner of the lower garden wanted to fill up his garden with earth until it was level with the upper garden, then there would be no vegetables. There would be no plant to remove. If there were no airspace there—if he were filling up his airspace—then there would be nothing growing there.
So what do we do? Rabbi Meir then responds that since both of these people could basically block each other, they could prevent the growth of this vegetable: either the person in the higher garden could dig down, or the person in the lower garden could fill his airspace with dirt. So let’s consider them equal. These arguments don’t work; they negate each other. Therefore, nobody has an advantage.
So what do we do? We see where this vegetable draws its nourishment from, and then we can see who it belongs to. Here, it draws its nourishment from the ground, from the dirt. That dirt belongs to the upper garden. So it’s their property.
A third opinion: Rabbi Shimon says that if the owner of the upper garden could stretch out his hand and take a vegetable while he was in his own garden, then it would be his. But the other vegetable, the one he cannot reach, belongs to the owner of the lower garden. In other words, Rabbi Shimon says that the halacha (Jewish law) is that the vegetables always belong to the owner of the upper garden. The assumption that he would give up his right to the vegetables if he didn’t have the ability to reach them...