Silly me. I forgot one other thing. Title by adverse possession isn’t something that “just happens” one day. You have to go to court and get it. You have to document the length of time you’ve been there, the taxes paid, the attempts to contact the absent owner, and so forth. Also, if the rightful owner shows up and claims his property, then any improvements you’ve made become his. So maybe you should just say “Thanks for the flowers” and put up a fence. Of course, you’d probably have to mow it yourself now.
The first one is really to find a local atty who specializes in this area. Get the referral from the local bar association. Find out how many AP cases he’s handled in the past year, and what percentage of his practice is AP related. Also wouldn’t hurt to know his batting average.
It might pay to have a survey done as well.
Now, on to your post. One thing you will need to know is when they started using this land. You only said it was several years before you bought it. In most AP, the use has to continue for an unbroken seven years. They can’t use it two years, skip a few and then come back and use it another five, and add up to seven.
Have they been paying the taxes on it? That is one of the indicators that will be examined in court. It would be hard to claim that they own it if someone else (you) paid the taxes.
Another thing that comes to mind is the “open, hostile, and notorious” test. If they made an agreement with the previous owner to use the area for their flowers and the previous owner agreed, then you buy the place and willingly continue the agreement with the apartment building, then their use of the land could hardly be considered “hostile”.
You might want to plug in “adverse possession” into the archive search. This topic has been discussed extensively in the past.
As far as I know they have used the land without any permission for as long as 20 years. And I don’t know for sure but I believe that the former owner like myself never objected to it. Mainly because they took care of it.