Local News in Brief : Laguna Hills : Court Revives Lawsuit Over Offending Shrubs

Suggesting that a gardener would have been more help than a judge, an appellate court revived a lawsuit over the height of foliage that had turned neighbors into bitter enemies.

The case involved a claim by William and Nancy Vaughan that next-door neighbors Waymen and Ermoine Warren had allowed shrubs on their property to grow higher than six feet. The height of the greenery not only violated the six-foot limit for their Stratford Ridge subdivision in Laguna Hills, it also obscured their view, the Vaughans claimed.

After a 1985 trial, a judge dismissed the case because the Warrens’ lawyer claimed that the Vaughans had failed to prove that his clients were, in fact, the same people who lived next door.

But the 4th District Court of Appeal found that the “weeding out of this lackluster lawsuit” had been too hasty, and the legal basis given for the dismissal was termed “hypertechnical.”

Justice Thomas F. Crosby Jr., who wrote the opinion, added a common-sense basis for the ruling.

“If they were not the (Vaughans’) neighbors and the owners of the allegedly offending landscaping, why did they sit silently by and let the litigation proceed to trial when they could have so easily obtained a dismissal?” Crosby wrote.

Crosby also knocked the lawsuit itself, writing in the appellate court opinion, “(The dispute) could be resolved far more efficiently by the substitution of a gardener for the legal system.”