Last week, to paraphrase JK Rowling, a breeze ruffled through the neat hedges of Privet Drive, or rather “Leylandii Drive” as we might call the Edinburgh home of the millionaire author, where the bushes are not mere privet, but rather, their bigger, faster-growing sibling,the Leylandii. Except it wasn’t just a breeze, it was various pieces of industrial cutting machinery, a set of extra traffic lights and, if some papers are to believed, the fuming of “angry” locals and frustrated drivers sitting in tailbacks all the way through the surrounding roads.

The 30ft Leylandii that runs down the front perimeter of JK Rowling’s home is not the only hedge on a street of many topiaries, though it is, at first glance, the biggest and grandest. If hedges are a mark of some desire for privacy, the keeping out of prying eyes or invaders, then this long stretch of road in the west of Edinburgh bears testament to the urge. There are hedges sculpted into arches, eggs, thick privet barriers, hedges almost growing out of the bottom of the roadside wall. As one local puts it, “People round here trim hedges. You look across the road those hedges have been trimmed. The previous guy that lived in Rowling's house got it cut every year or two years. It was a regular activity. Nothing new.”

The storm in a tree-cut is over, though, by the time we arrive, the tailbacks gone, conifer trimmed, and all is so hushed in the leafy suburb that you might think you had stumbled into an upmarket, more magical version of Privet Drive, the street Rowling named because she liked “the associations with both suburbia and enclosure, the Dursleys being so smugly middle class, and so determinedly separate from the wizarding world”. The Leylandii, in many ways, is the posh privet, the bush for persons with space. In truth, though, this conifer, was not planted by the notoriously private Rowling when she moved here six years ago. It was not part of her own seclusion plan, though one can imagine that one of the big draws in the particulars of the 31-room, 17th century mansion might have been the “overriding sense of privacy and serenity achieved by the stone wall boundary and well sited mature deciduous and coniferous trees”.

Neighbours testify that the hedge was put there by a previous owner, who also had it trimmed back once a year, or every couple of years. Anne, an elderly neighbour, out for a walk, notes, “They’ve been there for years, long before she moved in. Previous owner put them in. You used to be able to see the house. He was there for quite some time, and just before he sold the house, he had it trimmed, but it didn’t involve the council and lights and everything.” In other words, it’s not just Rowling who likes to keep the world out: a great many do. On the street she lives on, hers is not the only gaff from which gleaming cars glide out from behind electronic gates.

But this is not a street purely for the very wealthy. There are apartments, smaller detached houses, and opposite Rowling’s home itself, sheltered accommodation for the elderly. One resident pauses to chat. He’s not angry or resentful, he says. “Merely, we say, ‘Oh gosh, here she goes again.’” There is a sense, he notes, of the juxtaposition of her wealth and the inconvenience for others, which may rankle some. “But it’s usually about this time every year that the hedge has been cut. And I can’t remember the last time there was as much fuss as this.”

In fact, it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word, or indeed anything much to say about Rowling, this being an area where people seem happy to keep themselves to themselves. At Cloudberry, the local cafe in the tiny string of shops, just past the local golf course, old ladies shake their heads over the fuss there has been in the media over the hedges. “No one here’s bothered,” they say. A mother drinking a coffee while her twins rest in a buggy, protests: “She just had to get her hedge cut. What else is she supposed to do?”. None of them know Rowling, or have had any contact with her. She no longer needs a cafe, as she once to write in. Why would she, when she has her local 31 rooms, as well as a Perthshire estate?

Almost everyone tells me it’s not the locals that are bothered by the hedge cutting, it’s the people driving through. One woman observes, “It didn’t bother me. I didn’t get stuck in the traffic. But there were tailbacks all the way to the roundabout, and further. People that don’t live here were probably more inconvenienced, because the ones who use the road don’t actually live here. ” The people she was concerned for, she said, were elderly neighbours. “Because of the trimming, the bus stop was closed and a neighbour of mine had to walk quite far up the way, and an impossible distance in the other direction to get on the bus. And there are a lot of elderly people here.”

Yet, periodically there are stories suggesting that all is not well in relations between the locals and their celebrity author. There was outrage when she bought, in order to flatten, a neighbouring £1 million house so that she could extend her garden. Newspapers carried stories of the concerns of residents at her application for planning permission to build Hogwarts-style treehouses for her children – but actually there were only six lodged objections. Patricia Eason, who was secretary of the Cramond and Barnton community council at the time, recalls their own appeal to the council, and, says, “The concern was simply to ensure that the screening hedge was maintained on Brae Park Road. being the start of the Conservation Area leading to the River Almond Walkway.” She adds, “I think most people are happy with the way that J K Rowling looks after her hedge as must be the Council and the community is happy to respect her privacy.”

Welcome to Leylandii Drive, silent and tidy, as Rowling might put it, under the pale blue sky – where the most astonishing thing to happen lately is a hedge being cut.