Tree wars are tearing through Vacationland USA

• In some of the East Coast’s most exclusive enclaves, neighbors are feuding over trees.
• Summer people are risking lawsuits and hefty fines for a better view.
• On Nantucket, a man was charged with taking a chainsaw to his neighbor’s trees.

An ocean view is priceless in coastal New England — unless you cut down a neighbor’s trees to get it.

Cases of alleged unauthorized tree-cutting and poisoning, or so-called “timber trespass,” have sparked bitter neighbor-versus-neighbor legal feuds across wealthy US enclaves in recent years, with some resulting in seven-figure payouts.

One lawsuit playing out in a Massachusetts court involves a homeowner on the exclusive New England island of Nantucket who has accused her neighbor of chopping down a swath of nearly 50-year-old trees on her family’s property.

The plaintiff, Patricia Belford, is seeking $1.4 million in damages and has alleged in the court papers that Jonathan Jacoby trespassed onto her property and cut down the trees “to enhance the ocean view” from his own compound — there’s the main house, guest cottage, pool, and hot tub — that sits on about a half-acre next door.

Belford said in the lawsuit that the tree-felling occurred during the winter offseason on Nantucket, a nearly 48-square-mile island off Cape Cod, where billionaires own estates. The median home sale price last year was $3.73 million, according to a report from an island realtor, Fisher Real Estate.

Jacoby, the June lawsuit alleged, walked across his property at 3 Tautemo Way and onto Belford’s land. On his own, he used a chainsaw to cut down 16 30-foot-high cedar, cherry, and Leyland cypress trees before he asked his landscaper to help him clean up the debris, the lawsuit and an attached statement by the landscaper to local police say.

“The loss of the trees has significantly diminished the value and character of the Belford Property,” the lawsuit said. “The trees were a mature and integral part of the landscape, planted and cared for by the Belford family for nearly 50 years.”

Jacoby’s home was recently put on the market for nearly $10 million, with a listing that boasted “sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean.” Those views that the latest listing touted were “conspicuously missing” from previous, pre-treegate listings, Belford’s lawsuit said. The home was taken off the market this month.

“It’s usually done in some sort of act of desperation,” a real estate agent on the island told Business Insider of similar illicit tree trimmings. “They need that bump. This property has previously been on the market, and they haven’t been able to sell it. Therein lies the motivation.”

Jacoby is facing criminal charges over the tree-cutting ordeal.

The Nantucket Police Department has charged Jacoby with vandalizing property, a felony, and the misdemeanors of trespassing and cutting/destroying trees, the chief of police confirmed to BI.

An attorney for Jacoby, James Merberg, declined to comment on the criminal case and lawsuit but said that Jacoby will enter a plea of not guilty to the charges. Jacoby is scheduled to be arraigned on September 15.

Jacoby could not be reached for comment, but he defended his actions to The Boston Globe, saying in an email, “I wasn’t trespassing, I was clearing out her crappy trees.”

“Nantucket, the Vineyard — places where there is so much money at play — money and ego can get in the way very quickly,” Glenn Wood, Belford’s attorney, told BI, referring to the brazenness of the alleged action — and the attention it has gotten from the media.

Tree law, it turns out, is an active legal niche. While most lawsuits don’t accuse neighbors of such deliberate violations and most payouts or settlements don’t reach seven figures, there have been a number of high-profile disputes that involve stealth maneuvers and big money.

Tree-cutting fights aren’t rare

It’s easy to see why trees can spur neighborly spats. A dead tree causes an eyesore; a large one blocks a view; a tree struck by lightning can leave debris.

One look at the subreddit “tree law,” which has 150,000 members, and the subject matter’s universality becomes clear. Some people post asking for advice, like what to do about a neighbor’s willow whose branches bow onto their roof. Others post on the latest news in the space, like a Missouri law regarding the sale of invasive species.

New Hampshire-based attorney Israel Piedra, who started the website NewEnglandTreeLaw.com last year, told BI that tree-cutting disputes are “more common than people would think.”

Piedra, an attorney at the firm Welts, White & Fontaine, P.C., said he has carved out a practice representing property owners who have had their trees cut down without permission and has handled more than 100 such cases in recent years, primarily out of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Most cases, he said, do not involve accusations as “egregious” as those in the Nantucket lawsuit.

“More commonly, you’re dealing with a case where there isn’t actually intentional conduct, or there isn’t malicious intent,” Piedra said, explaining that the majority of cases he has handled involve a careless homeowner who did not check the property line before cutting down trees.

“They try to make it look like a mistake, or at least maintain some level of plausible deniability,” he said.

He said these cases are usually settled out of court through a neighbor’s homeowner’s insurance or a contractor’s commercial liability insurance, and don’t involve such high-value property or high-value damage claims. Piedra said he has never had a case settle for more than $1 million, though some cases have settled for six-figure sums.

Timber trespass laws, Piedra said, vary state by state, with the New England states of Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts having some of the strongest in the country.

“There’s a lot of people looking for lawyers that do this kind of work,” he said.

When money grows on trees

The allegations in the Nantucket lawsuit are extreme — crossing a property line, taking down healthy trees, the expenses involved. Putting in replacement trees, which would have to be brought from off the island, would cost nearly $500,000, Belford’s lawsuit said.

There have been other high-profile, big-ticket squabbles.

An incident on Nantucket’s sister island, Martha’s Vineyard, ended in 2023 with a $2.5 million settlement after inn owners were accused of having more than 100 trees cut down on a neighboring property in a move that, a lawsuit said, “wreaked havoc and devastation akin to a war zone.”

In a 2006 case, a defendant in Vermont was ordered to pay $1.8 million in damages after timber trespassing.

In one of the most publicized instances of human-on-tree destruction, last year, Amelia and Arthur Bond agreed to pay more than $1.7 million in fines and settlements after they’d applied herbicide to the area near the oak trees on the property of Lisa Gorman, the widow of the former L.L. Bean president and heir, in the idyllic New England coastal town of Camden, Maine.

Like in the case of Jacoby and Belford, that of the Bonds and Gorman involved multimillion-dollar properties and a water view.

The Bonds’ weapon of choice was Tebuthioron, an herbicide that, according to a consent agreement, Amelia Bond — the former CEO of St. Louis Community Foundation, a charity with about $500 million in assets — applied to two large oak trees on Gorman’s summer property, an oceanfront estate valued at $5 million.

Once the chemical started to wreak havoc on Gorman’s trees, Amelia Bond — whose 5,000 square-foot, $3.7 million mansion sits up the hill — allegedly swooped in and offered to cover half of the cost of their removal, Gorman’s attorney said in a letter to a town official. What looked like neighborly kindness was really a ploy to get a better look at the water, the letter said.

The pair confessed and paid more than $1.5 million to Gorman, $180,000 to the town, $4,500 to the Maine Board of Pesticides Control Board, and $30,000 for environmental testing, according to documents from a Camden Select Board meeting.

The Bonds and their attorney did not respond to requests for comment from BI. Gorman, through her attorney, declined to comment.

With details like a poisoning gone wrong, a wealthy heir, and a vacation hot spot, it’s no wonder that tree law has become a surprisingly sexy corner of the legal world.

“You mix all that into a cocktail,” Wood, Belford’s attorney, told BI. “It makes for an interesting fact pattern.”