PETER BOODY PHOTO | A surviving cherry tree planted by Mike Loriz in the Heights.

Six years ago, Islander Mike Loriz, an airline pilot and former Naval airman who is a committed environmentalist and board member of the Mashomack Preserve, planted a number of white oak and cherry seedlings at three sites in the Heights with the blessing of the Heights Property Owners Corporation (HPOC). Ever since, he has cared for them at no charge.

As he drove off North Ferry on Sunday, July 10 and passed through the Heights, he found all but one of the 12 to 14 trees in three locations were gone, he said in an interview this week. The same day he sent a letter to HPOC General Manager Julie Ben-Susan telling her of his discovery and demanding reimbursement, which he has since offered to donate to the Heights for future plantings.

The lone survivor is a cherry tree on the triangle in front of the Chequit, according to Mr. Loriz.

HPOC’s volunteer Landscaping Committee, some of whose members have been unhappy with the ungainly saplings in unattractive protective plastic sleeves, cut them down despite specific instructions from Ms. Ben-Susan that the trees were not to be removed, she said in an interview Friday.

“I think in all fairness it wasn’t intentional” that the committee contravened HPOC’s policy, Ms. Ben-Susan said. “Our mandate was to take off the plastic sleeves and somehow that got misconstrued and they took down the trees and everybody’s terribly sorry.”

“I find it almost incomprehensible that young white oaks could be killed with no notice,” Mr. Loriz wrote her. “The killing of those trees represents a real loss to the Heights, in my opinion. They would have been truly gorgeous specimens.”

Roberta Martin, chair of the Landscaping Committee, took full responsibility for what she called a “miscommunication and misunderstanding” in an interview Monday. She said she had instructed committee volunteers taking part in an annual clean-up to remove the plastic sleeves.

She said she’d believed the committee did have authority to remove any trees that were “not viable” and that she had told committee members to use their own judgment as they inspected the trees, some of which appeared to be dead or dying, she said. She understood that only three or four trees had been cut down, she said.

The committee had “no idea” the trees were being cared for by someone, she said. Because they seemed ungainly and out of place, the committee wanted Heights management to allow the trees to be transplanted to a single location where they could mature.

“We deeply regret what’s happened,” she said. She added the committee would “be happy” to meet with Mr. Loriz and work with him on a replanting program.

The stumps of three saplings cut down on the triangle near the Chequit appeared to be less than an inch in diameter.

Ms. Martin said in an email response to a question that she had never heard Ms. Ben-Susan tell the committee the trees were not to be cut.

“The more important fact may be that there was no landscape meeting this summer that was long enough or at the right time for everyone, including Julie, to be present,” she wrote. “On Landscape Day, the volunteers were working off a list that had been compiled by the Landscape Committee at the end of last year, as a list of projects/tasks that were on our agenda for the future -— to be done by the crew or other seasonal help.

“I believe that the misunderstanding entered here: Julie did indeed tell the committee in past years that the seedlings had been ‘donated.’ What we did not understand is that the person who had donated them had also planted them and was evidently tending them. I, at least, assumed that the POC crew had planted the trees — and that is why we had made the request that the crew transplant the seedlings to a central location … until they were larger.

“Julie handles so many, many issues simultaneously, so brilliantly, that the fact a tiny miscommunication like this has resulted in such a debacle is truly unfortunate. She is an outstanding manager and always sensitive to everyone’s interests and feelings.”

Mr. Loriz, the commander of the Island’s American Legion post — and whose wife Cara was editor of the Reporter until recently and now is executive director of Sylvester Manor — asked in his letter to Ms. Ben-Susan that the Heights pay him $1,200 for the trees and the time and materials required to care for them. He has offered to donate the payment to the Heights for further tree-planting efforts.

Ms. Ben-Susan said she expected the HPOC Board of Directors would pay Mr. Loriz’s bill.

The bill amounts to a discount over what the charge would have been if a commercial landscaper had planted and cared for the trees, Ms. Ben-Susan acknowledged — even if that had been possible. White oaks and cherries are not carried by commercial nurseries, she noted.

She said she didn’t know which member or members of the Landscaping Committee had actually cut down the trees. Ms. Martin declined to give the names of her volunteers. Mr. Loriz, in an initial email to the Reporter that included a copy of his July 10 letter to HPOC, referred to them as “renegade members” of the committee.

Mr. Loriz bought the sapling white oaks — a slow-growing and eventually majestic tree that once dominated the old-growth woods on the Island and the rest of the East End — from state and forestry nurseries, he said. He also has collected and raised seedlings himself before deer could gobble them up. The explosion in the deer population in recent decades, and deer’s preference for the seedlings, is why native white oak is not replacing itself on the Island, even in the Mashomack Preserve, Mr. Loriz said.

He started planting white oaks on the property of the Presbyterian Church. In 2004, he said he talked to Heights administrator Cathy Driscoll and later Ms. Ben-Susan and HPOC’s North Ferry Manager Bridg Hunt about planting oaks in the community to replace those that were in decline. With the Heights’ blessing, he planted about 12 to 14 trees in three locations, he said: in front of the Chequit, in Sylvan Park below the hardware store and in Prospect Park. They were protected in five-foot plastic tubes, he said. Some were vandalized the first year and he replaced some with another native, the somewhat faster growing cherry, he said.

Mr. Loriz had previously worked with the Heights to cut down a nearly 120-year-old dying copper beech, a gigantic tree that stood on the south side of Waverly Place. Mr. Loriz, an expert miller, turned the tree into high quality, specialized lumber and gave it away to Heights residents who wanted it as a memento of the tree, he said.