The arborist walked around the stump twice before he answered me. Then he asked for my property survey and the old deed. I brought both the next morning. He compared the measurements, looked at the photographs I’d taken before the tree was removed, and finally said, “Ma’am, I think your neighbor just made a very expensive mistake.” The trunk wasn’t entirely on his side of the property line. In fact, most of it was on mine.
I confronted my neighbor with the survey, expecting him to finally apologize. Instead, he laughed and said the tree had been “mostly his problem” anyway. Then he showed me an old sketch he’d apparently received when he bought his house. The strange part was that the boundary on his sketch was different from the boundary on my deed. I took everything to the county office, where a clerk pulled up the original subdivision map. She stared at it for a long time before saying, “This isn’t the first time someone has asked about this line.”
The original map showed something neither of us had known: the property line had been corrected decades earlier, but the correction had never been reflected on my neighbor’s copy. Then the clerk found a second filing from eleven years ago—one that specifically referenced the oak tree. Someone had already disputed ownership of that exact section of land, and the dispute had been settled in writing. I asked who had filed it, and she turned the screen toward me. It was my neighbor. He had known for years exactly where the property line was, which meant he hadn’t accidentally cut down my tree while I was away at the funeral.
