In May, when excavators showed up to raze a house in a northern New Jersey suburb, Ellen Seidman called the township to complain that the machinery was dangerously close to the roots of a towering tree at the edge of an adjacent property.
Inspectors arrived. Workers erected a fence to encircle a tree estimated by one arborist to be 271 years old. And a cause was born.
A virtual hearing this month about the fate of the tree, a London plane, drew about 50 residents — more than any similar meeting, said Victor De Luca, the mayor of the township, Maplewood.
Township officials have twice refused to grant the builder, Tony Nardone, a permit to remove the tree to build two homes. His lawyers have suggested a lawsuit, setting up a standoff that has tapped grievances that seem to spread well beyond the tree’s 98-foot canopy.
To the builder who bought the land from a college friend and then went through the process of subdividing the property, the township’s opposition represents a midstream rewriting of land-use rules. Family members who sold the home to Mr. Nardone see ulterior, not-in-my-backyard motives in the neighbors’ campaign to save the tree.
And for the growing number of tree activists in a town named for a different tree and known for its progressive politics, saving the London plane tree has become a statement of principle about the township’s, and the nation’s, identity. They gathered near the tree the day after the Trump administration announced that it planned to allow logging in nearly 45 million acres of untouched national forests, including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. Several people in the crowd linked the two issues.
“This is where we can raise our voices and make a difference,” said Rona Kwestel of Maplewood.
“Can we make enough of a difference in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska? I don’t know,” she added. “But maybe we can make a difference here, for this one tree.”
Destené Styles grew up in a part of New Jersey where farms have been sold off to build massive warehouses that satisfy the region’s yen for online shopping. She said she moved to Maplewood “for the trees,” after fleeing a blitz of commercial construction in the state’s second-largest city, Jersey City.
“If I can’t change it on a global scale,” Ms. Styles said of what she sees as unchecked development, “at least I can stand up for what’s right in my community.”
An ordinance requires Maplewood property owners to obtain a permit before removing any tree that is 12 inches or more in diameter. It also provides protections for trees deemed rare or historic.
The London plane has a diameter of about 72 inches, but has never been designated historic — a detail that Mr. Nardone’s lawyers have stressed. But Mr. De Luca and other town officials have concluded that the tree is rare, healthy and worth preserving.
The debate is not an unfamiliar one in the suburbs that ring New York City, where homeowners often zealously oppose development, sometimes in defense of trees.
But even for a township like Maplewood, a 26,000-resident enclave known to champion liberal causes, the debate has been infused with rare urgency.
More than 2,000 people have signed petitions and spoken publicly against felling the tree, including some who have invoked the divine. “If it’s taken down, I hope that that tree has a connection with God that will take out its wrath on the people who chose to do that,” Ms. Kwestel testified at the Aug. 3 hearing.
The builder is girding for what his lawyers claim could be a precedent-setting battle. “The issue here is bigger than one property,” said Matthew Posada, one of Mr. Nardone’s lawyers, adding that his client “intends to exercise his lawful right to develop it accordingly.”
Ms. Seidman said she feared that removing the tree could worsen flooding in the low-lying area. “This is about preserving a beautiful old tree that doesn’t deserve to die,” she said.
A victory for her and her like-minded neighbors might mean that Mr. Nardone would be able to build just one home, not two, given the location of the tree and the size of lot.
That has led to animosity between Ms. Seidman and the family that sold the property adorned with the tall tree on Pierson Road, a dead-end street surrounded by a golf course. Members of the family question whether she wants to save a tree or block the construction of a home close to hers.
Elizabeth Waeschle Vetter said she and her 14 siblings sold the property last year for $1.3 million and set aside the proceeds to cover the cost of long-term care for their youngest sister, who is disabled. Her family, she said, will not benefit financially from any future construction. But she said she had become aggravated by opposition that does not appear to her to be rooted entirely in fact.
“They’re just jumping on the feel-good moment,” Ms. Vetter said of the surge of opposition.
Ms. Vetter also questions the tree’s estimated age, so much so that she reviewed architectural surveys of the neighborhood, which suggest that the first homes there were not built until the 1890s on what had previously been farmland.
Richard Wolowicz, the arborist, said his estimate was a function of the tree’s diameter and height, not a boring, which would be more precise. Still, he said he was confident in his assessment.
For now, there is no construction on the lot, and a crater where a house once stood has been overtaken by weeds.
Mr. De Luca, the mayor, said that he also saw something bigger at stake in the tree saga.
“People are losing confidence in institutions, including government,” he said. “There was a process here. I think it at least allowed people to believe that things can work as they’re laid out to do.”
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