Another option, perhaps, is to bring it up with the seller's realty agent, and ask them to communicate with the property owner your concern.
If the property owner's response is either a) none at all or b) refusal to do anything about it then...
present him with a deed option to take legal possession of that strip of property, including the tree and sprinkler, so that as of that moment, it will be YOUR property and not his.
This type of situation actually happened to us in our last house in Connecticut. A low-income senior housing apartment complex went up behind our house, and the road leading off the main street to that complex cut between my property and the next door neighbor's property.
Everything was hunky dory for years before we moved in. And then, one day, we got a notice from HUD Housing demanding a quit-claim on the 100-foot long, 1.5-foot wide strip of land that was part of their sidewalk. Turns out their surveyor screwed up by a degree or two.
We ended up selling HUD that strip of land for around $4000, and that in turn obligated them to maintain the sidewalk and the frontage of our driveway in perpetuity. We no longer owned it, but we had the right-of-way on it.
It was a good deal.
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