Tree Poisoning Trend Spreads in Rich Midcoast Community: For a Room with a View, Plant a Spike

A midcoast Maine homeowner who was annoyed his neighbor’s trees were ruining his harbor view may have found a solution – pesticide.

State officials suspect a Rockport man drilled holes in the trees outside Ruth Graham’s $2.8 million Mechanic Street house and injected them with poison.

Stephen Antonson, who owns a house next door to Graham, had previously asked her to trim her trees.

Barring that, he wanted to buy a sliver of her property so he could chop down the trees to improve his view of the harbor, authorities said.

Graham was interested in neither trimming nor selling.

Not long after telling Antonson so, she noticed that the trees along Rockport harbor, encompassing the rear line of her property, started dying.

Graham called arborists to investigate.

They said that based on a paper trail between him and Graham, and the subsequent discovery of drilled holes in the tree trunks as well as evidence of poison in the trees and on the ground, it was clear to them who was responsible.

The trees that were poisoned stood in a direct line between the suspect’s rear deck at 9 Mechanic Street and his view of the ocean, tree experts said.

“While Antonson denies any involvement in the herbicide applications to the trees at 11 Mechanic Street, the positioning of the trees in addition to prior correspondence from Antonson to Graham requesting tree removal indicate that Antonson would have been the only one to benefit from the application of herbicides to the affected area,” the Maine Bureau of Pesticides Control staff wrote in their case summary.

Antonson’s attorney, Daniel Nuzzi of Portland, declined comment.

State law prohibits application of pesticides without permission to someone else’s property.

Bureau staff said the Maine Department of Forestry inspected Graham’s trees and collected tree-bore samples, which tested positive for Imazapic and Triclopyr.

Imazapic, an herbicide, is classified as an environmental hazard and toxic to fish.

Triclopyr, an agrochemical used as a herbicide, is deemed a health and environmental danger.

The state has proposed a deal with Antonson, suspected of unlawfully poisoning his neighbor’s trees. He’d pay a $3,000 penalty without admitting complicity.

Bureau board members last week rejected the deal, urging staffers to go back and seek an admission of guilt from Antonson.

The alleged tree-poisoning caper is actually the second recent one in the midcoast area of Maine, the first one occurring in neighboring Camden last year.

Both cases allegedly involve people annoyed their neighbors’ trees were blocking their water views.

In Camden, police found that an herbicide application had resulted in intentional vegetative poisoning.

A $210,000 consent agreement was reached between Arthur and Amelia Bond and the town of Camden.

A $1.5 million private settlement between the Bonds and their neighbor, Lisa Gorman, the one who owned the trees, resolved the fight.

Elsewhere in the Northeast, another similar tree case just hit the headlines in Connecticut, where the town of Southbury has filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against a wealthy couple who allegedly cut down 140 trees on public property so they could see the lake behind their house.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, “They are different than you and me.”

Apparently so.