Two judges called for the definition of what makes a garden a garden to be rewritten yesterday after a High Court battle over a pensioner's uprooted saplings.

Property developer Michael Rockall, 65, had been given a criminal record for cutting down the young trees.

Officials had decided that his overgrown three-acre garden had turned into woodland  -  that meant he needed a licence to fell the trees and he was prosecuted.

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The battleground: The definition of the land around this £750,00 home in Suffolk was under dispute - garden or woodland?

But yesterday the two High Court judges overturned Mr Rockall's conviction from two years ago and called on the Oxford English Dictionary definition of an English
country garden to be changed so that wild and uncultivated land can be regarded in law as a garden.

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Michael and Gillian Rockall outside their home

The saga began when the businessman and his wife Gillian moved into a £750,000 house in Woolverstone, Suffolk, in 2004.

He set about clearing the overgrown parts of the 2.83 acres of land which came with the house, with the aim of planting oak and beech trees and returning it to its condition of 50 years ago.

But Forestry Commission officials objected when his contractor uprooted alder saplings that had begun growing wild on the land.

Mr Rockall claimed before Lowestoft magistrates that Environment Department rules did not require him to have a licence to cut down trees in his own garden. But magistrates decided the overgrown land had 'ceased to be a garden' and convicted him.

The legal battle ended yesterday when Lord Justice Moses, sitting with Mr Justice Blake, overturned the conviction, saying that the definition of a garden has become much broader in modern times. Mr Rockall's barrister, Dominic Grieve, QC, said a previous owner had allowed the land to run wild.

Lord Justice Moses said: 'The Oxford English Dictionary states that a garden is an enclosed piece of ground devoted to the cultivation of flowers, fruit or vegetables.

'That definition is clearly now too narrow, as the current fashion for wild gardens and meadow areas amply demonstrates.

'The reality is that no description will categorically establish whether a piece of land is a garden or not. It is incumbent on the fact finder to determine its use.

'It is important to look at the relationship between the owner and the land, and the history and character of the land and space.'

The judge added: 'It has been contended that the garden was so disused that it had ceased to be a garden - I have some doubts about that.

'Did it cease to be a garden because the owner went abroad and the occupier had neither the means nor the intention to keep it well maintained? There will be many of us that inherit land and are unable to maintain it in the way our forefathers kept it, through insufficient time or money.

'The fact that the previous owner didn't have the need or desire for the land as a gardener and that the owner went abroad didn't mean that the garden ceased to be one.'