Couple slaps neighbors with $1.13M suit for chopping hedges

This is a real hedge row.

A Hamptons couple slapped their neighbors with a $ 1.13 million lawsuit for trespassing on their 2-acre estate and chopping down “historic” hedges that divided the pricey properties.

“This action seeks redress for reprehensible acts conducted by a bad neighbor,” Stephen and Nan Swid huff in their Manhattan Supreme Court suit against Alejandro Camacho and his wife, Pamela Rollins.

“Robert Frost said good fences make good neighbors?” the Swids’ attorney Larry Hutcher quipped. “Well good privets make even better neighbors.”

The Swids gripe that Camacho “callously destroyed hundreds of feet of privet hedge which has been a staple on the property for decades.”

“The privet hedge provides [the Swids] privacy and is an irreplaceable part of the property’s history,” the suit says.

Camacho, a partner at the multinational law firm Clifford Chance, allegedly slashed his neighbor’s 240-foot-long, 12-foot-high bushes to create more open space surrounding his $ 5 million home on Foster Crossing in Southampton.

Camacho did not have permission for the “deliberate and wanton destruction of the [Swids] small trees,” the couple complains in the suit.

Yet he “inexcusably went on the property in order to destroy [the trees] by trimming down the privet hedge.”

“They wanted a view and they acted improperly,” Hutcher said of the shrub snub.

Stephen Swid, head of the entertainment royalties firm SEAC, which reps Bob Dylan and Beyonce, owns a 7,000-square-foot second home on S. Main Street just south of Camacho’s manse.

The Swids’ property, built in the 1890s, sits just a few blocks from the ocean and includes a tennis court, pool and “unprecedented architectural landscaping.”

“The gardens and trees surrounding the estate have been located on the property for more than half a century,” court papers say.

Swid says the unauthorized trimming cost him $ 30,000 in hedges and lowered the value on his $ 11 million pad by $ 100,000. He’s also seeking $ 1 million in punitive damages.

The topiary trimming killed the greenery, leaving a “significant eyesore,” Hutcher said in the suit.

“As a result the remaining portion of the privet hedge had to be removed and the stumps excavated,” the suit says.

The price tag for the hedge is $ 250 per stump.

He said his clients, who winter in Manhattan, learned from an employee in December about the bushwhacking.

“All they want to do is have peace and quiet and their destructive neighbors ruined that,” Hutcher said.

But the warring couples should be able to steer clear of each other in Manhattan, though they both live on Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row, they’re separated by about 20 city blocks with the Camacho-Rollins’ residing near E. 82nd Street and the Swids down by E. 64th Street.

Camacho did not return messages for comment.

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