I think it would be smart to have a distance of maybe 4 or 5 blocks that you could spawn in a tree with /tree or /bigtree. I've given my players the commands but I've had to set a huge WorldGuard region of 150 blocks outside of my survival spawn area where the command is blocked. Players were snipering trees into spawn lol.

This would also help limit players from putting trees into players protected or "claimed" areas they don't have permission to build in and with things like skyblock so they are not putting trees on other players islands that they can see.

Just a suggestion, thanks for reading

Could easily implement this with a config option and/or permission and simple check within the command (distance from player to targeted block).

I think from Essentials' end, it will only be able to limit the range of the command. WorldGuard not actually preventing trees from growing is an issue in that plugin, if anything. Check if there's a flag for that, and if not, maybe suggest it to them.

Yeah if I was following your feature request correctly you were asking for a range to be added to the command. So for example, if the range was 5 and the player was more than 5 blocks away from the block, it would not place a tree.