NORTH KINGSTOWN –– Nine years ago, Michael Kent rocked the upscale Plum Beach area of Saunderstown, chopping down all the trees on his land next to busy Boston Neck Road and painting the stumps in garish, fluorescent colors.

It was a peaceful –– and in Kent’s view, artistic –– protest against the town’s refusal to let him build a house on the two undersized lots, as well as the neighbors’ calls for nature to be preserved.

“They want open space?” Kent said at the time. “I’ll give ’em open space.”

Kent –– who now splits his time between West Palm Beach, Fla., and a home overlooking Narragansett’s Bluff Hill Cove –– is about to get paid back, and then some.

Robert E. and Louise E. MacDonald, of Ruxton, Md., this week agreed to pay Kent $150,000 to refund the $43,000 he paid them for the two lots in 1998, and to compensate him for costs, damages and interest lost over the years he owned the lots but could not build on them.

The MacDonalds also agreed to give the lots to John and Catherine Dusel, who had bought two adjacent lots from the MacDonalds in 1995. And they agreed to pay $60,000 to the Dusels’ lawyer, Neil P. Philbin.

KENT’S LOTS, less than an acre combined, extend from Boston Neck Road to Sunset Avenue, just north of Harbor View Avenue. The Dusels’ lots, also less than an acre, at Sunset and Harbor View avenues, include a 1½-story house and a tennis court.

The problem: three months before the MacDonalds sold the two lots to the Dusels, the town changed its zoning ordinance, essentially merging the four undersized lots into one.

Louise MacDonald, a journalist and writer from Narragansett, said in a telephone interview this week that she and her husband, a retired U.S. foreign-service officer from San Francisco, had moved to Morocco earlier that year and were unaware of any zoning changes.

At some point before the closing of the sale, MacDonald said, her real estate agent told her that there was a problem but never told her that subdividing the lots was illegal.

“Here I was in Morocco. She [MacDonald’s real estate agent] had a list of four persons or commissions that I should call,” MacDonald said.

MacDonald said she called her lawyer. “He said to go ahead and not worry.” And so they did.

The sale went through and the MacDonalds continued paying taxes on the remaining two lots.

Three years later, the MacDonalds sold those lots to Kent.

“We didn’t hear anything until July 13, 2001,” MacDonald said. “We got a summons to go to court.”

As it turns out, Kent had opened Pandora’s box when he attempted to build a house. The town said the undersized lots were illegally subdivided.

In 2001, the town sued to enforce the May 1995 zoning amendment.

FROM THE OUTSET, Kent — best known as a developer and nightclub owner, the likes of Bootleggers, Diesel and NV At The Strand in Providence — made his displeasure known and relished every opportunity to irritate his neighbors.

“Enjoy the neon flowers,” the then-50-year-old told the neighbors after the Zoning Board denied his application.

Neighbors didn’t know what he meant until he put his plan into action.

First, he cut down all the trees on the two lots in question, painting the stumps in fluorescent colors. Not even the rocks were spared.

Neighbors sued.

“It’s a joke,” Kent said defending his landscaping as art in Superior Court. “But I’m thrilled and I’m more than happy to rise to the occasion.”

Metal palm trees came later, courtesy of his former nightclub Bootleggers.

Two years later, after the town turned down his building proposal again, Kent resorted to uncomposted chicken manure, saying he wanted to start a garden to grow vegetables for the poor.

Neighbors didn’t buy it and neither did a judge who sentenced him, his brother Steven and an employee of their real-estate development company, Richard Page, to community service and ordered them to pay $475 each for creating a nuisance and $2,256 jointly to refund North Kingstown’s legal costs.

Neighbors said it took about two weeks for the “pungent” odor, which could be smelled some 800 feet away, to dissipate.

Next, he posted signs inviting beachgoers to park on his lot to access Plum Beach.

LOUISE MACDONALD said she and her husband plan on taking out a reverse mortgage on their Maryland house to pay the $210,000 settlement within the next two weeks.

The proposed settlement would end the legal tangle over the land, dismissing with prejudice cross-claims filed by the Dusels and Kent against the MacDonalds –– meaning they won’t be able to file another complaint over the matter –– and terminating as well a complaint filed by the neighbors who called Kent’s landscaping a nuisance.

Time and Mother Nature –– with perhaps some human help –– have erased all but the smallest traces of the multicolor display, though pink and yellow paint still adorns some of the boulders.

A young forest of saplings and bushes has mostly covered the lot — though it’s a far cry from the neighboring manicured lawns.

Still, nothing will be final until the settlement agreement is sealed in July. — South County regional editor Alan Rosenberg contributed to this article.

marmenta@projo.com