Bottomley Evergreens and Farms, the family-owned North Carolina grower of wreaths, Christmas trees, and pumpkins, has faced a run of lawsuits and enforcement actions over the past decade covering wage theft, stream pollution, a workplace death, and allegedly mislabeled Christmas trees. The largest recoveries came from workers: a 2014 federal wage case in Oregon and a related state class action together pushed the company past $1 million in back pay and penalties. The most closely watched fight has been in North Carolina, where regulators pursued the company for destroying trout streams during a 360-acre land clearing in 2020.
The company, headquartered in Ennice, North Carolina, farms tens of thousands of acres across North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, and Oregon. William Blan Bottomley co-founded the operation in 1990 with his son Mitchell; after William’s death in September 2015, Mitchell took over as chief executive.
Federal Wage Lawsuit in Oregon
On April 30, 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor sued Bottomley Evergreens and its affiliated entities in the District of Oregon, alleging willful violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act going back to at least August 2010. The case, Thomas E. Perez, Secretary of Labor v. Bottomley Evergreens and Farms, Inc., et al. (Case No. 3:14-cv-00718), named William, Mitchell, and Martha Bottomley individually along with the corporate defendants.
The government’s complaint laid out four categories of violations. Wreath makers were paid a piece rate for each wreath, without regard to hours worked, which produced hourly pay below the minimum wage. Workers who topped 40 hours in a week got straight hourly pay instead of time-and-a-half, and training time went uncompensated. Managers failed to track start and end times or keep accurate records of hours and wages. And the company shipped wreaths produced in violation of wage laws through interstate commerce, itself a separate FLSA “hot goods” violation.
The suit named 439 employees at the Gresham, Oregon facility. According to the Statesman Journal, almost all had Hispanic last names.
The case moved quickly. A consent judgment was entered on June 10, 2014, roughly six weeks after filing. Bottomley agreed to pay $229,178 in back wages and damages to 417 workers, plus $86,700 in civil penalties, for a total exceeding $315,000. Individual payments ranged from $34 to nearly $10,000. The company did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to report its steps toward future FLSA compliance.
A separate class action in Multnomah County over unpaid overtime settled for $691,000, according to the Oregonian.
Ramey Creek Environmental Case
In June 2020, Bottomley Properties began clear-cutting about 360 acres of mountain forest in Alleghany and Surry counties, North Carolina, to create cattle grazing land. The clearing sent massive amounts of sediment into Ramey Creek, Roaring Fork Creek, and Big Pine Creek. State inspectors documented silt deposits of three inches to two feet deep in stream channels. Fecal bacteria from cattle grazing along unprotected banks exceeded the state freshwater standard by more than six times, and fertilizer and manure runoff drove significant algae growth.
Brook trout took the worst of it. In Ramey Creek, the population near the clear-cut site dropped from 20 fish to zero over 18 months. The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission ran an emergency rescue operation in June 2021 and saved only 13 trout out of hundreds previously documented.
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality issued its first notice of violation in November 2020 and a second in 2021. The state Attorney General’s office filed a verified complaint seeking injunctive relief, asking a court to order the company to stabilize the land, submit a remediation plan, remove sediment by hand, plant 25-foot native hardwood buffers along all stream features, and monitor the sites for three years.
In April 2022, the Division of Water Resources assessed a civil penalty of more than $263,000, which regulators called one of the largest in the agency’s history, for what they described as “egregious violations” of water quality standards. A July 2022 notice added an allegation that the company had filled 1,000 square feet of wetland with debris in Alleghany County.
Bottomley contested the fine. An administrative law judge initially threw out the penalty on a signature-authority technicality in May 2023; DEQ reissued it, and after another appeal a judge reduced the fine to $184,000. Both sides appealed to Superior Court, which ordered mediation. On September 4, 2025, the parties settled for $92,500, paid in installments over four years. Neither side admitted to violations or errors.
The Agricultural Exemption
The clearing was possible because North Carolina’s Sedimentation Pollution Control Act exempts agricultural and mining operations from erosion permits and from the requirement to maintain vegetative buffers along streams. By classifying its work as agricultural, Bottomley avoided the environmental review and erosion controls that would apply to almost any other land-disturbing activity. The company put a small herd of cattle on part of the property, cut trees to the stream banks, and left much of the site bare. The conservation group MountainTrue raised concerns that the company was exploiting the exemption while potentially planning future real estate development.
The exemption allowed the clearing, but it did not authorize the resulting water pollution: state law still prohibits discharges that degrade water quality regardless of the underlying land use.
The case prompted a legislative response. The North Carolina Senate passed S613 in April 2023 to require a 25-foot vegetative buffer along state-designated trout streams for new agricultural operations. The bill passed its first House reading on April 25, 2023, then stalled in committee and effectively died.
OSHA Fatality Citation
On June 24, 2022, a Bottomley Evergreens employee was killed while loading a tractor onto a flatbed trailer on a hill. The truck began rolling forward, and the worker was crushed between the truck and the trailer while trying to stop it.
OSHA investigated and issued a serious citation on December 20, 2022, proposing a $14,502 penalty. Bottomley contested the citation in February 2023. In November 2024, the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission denied the company’s motion to dismiss. The case settled on May 20, 2025, with the penalty reduced to $9,426.
Christmas Tree Mislabeling Suit
In January 2020, Evergreen East Cooperative, a Wisconsin-based Christmas tree cooperative, sued Bottomley Evergreens, Home Depot, and Whole Foods in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The cooperative alleged that during the 2019 holiday season the defendants conspired to mislabel Canadian balsam fir trees as the more premium Fraser fir variety. According to the complaint, Bottomley imported 100,000 or more Canadian balsams, and retailers sold potentially hundreds of thousands of the mislabeled trees.
Home Depot called it an “isolated labeling error” that was corrected once discovered. Whole Foods and Bottomley moved to dismiss, arguing the complaint failed to show the mislabeling influenced consumers’ purchasing decisions.
On March 26, 2021, Judge Alison J. Nathan granted Whole Foods’ motion to dismiss, finding that Evergreen East’s allegations were based largely on “information and belief” rather than concrete facts, and noting that the cooperative could have personally examined Whole Foods’ trees, as it had done with Home Depot’s, but chose not to. The Second Circuit affirmed on January 27, 2023, noting that Evergreen East had seven months between the dismissal and an offer of judgment during which it could have sought to amend its complaint but never did.