A DANGEROUS operation to fell a huge, diseased beech tree standing in a Tavistock garden was carried out recently by tree surgeons.

The team of six men, armed with chainsaws and a crane, took a full day to bring down the 70-foot tree, thought to be between 200 and 300 years old.

The decision to fell the eye-catching tree in Trelawney Road came after a limb weighing about two tonnes suddenly fell from the tree a couple of weeks ago.

Fortunately nobody was injured by the gigantic limb, which fell in the middle of one afternoon causing slight damage to a garden shed.

The beech had stood in the garden of Anne and John Smith in Trelawney Road.

?It was lucky it fell there and not in the road,? said Mrs Smith. ?It could have been really devastating. It was a huge limb, not just a branch, and it almost landed right on our shed.

?We were indoors at the time, so it?s fortunate nobody was outside. We heard a sound and my husband thought the pressure cooker had exploded.?

Mrs Smith contacted Tavistock tree surgeon and family friend Paul Greenhill to examine the tree.

With the aid of fellow tree surgeon Mike Woolley, he probed the wood and found the tree was riddled with a fungus.

?It was a bracket fungus which attacks the whole structure,? explained Paul, who recently returned to West Devon from a year working in Colorado, USA.

?Unfortunately, the only option was felling because the fungus made the tree very dangerous.

?There was nothing else we could do to make it safe, which is a shame because it was such a prominent tree and had been there for hundreds of years.?

Paul and his team started the arduous task of cutting the tree down at 8am and worked in baking heat until after 9pm.

He said the operation was tricky because of the size and location of the tree, and a string of bad luck did not help.

?It was pretty tough. Two of us were actually up in the tree, and the crane driver couldn?t see us, which made it really hard to co-ordinate things.

?But things got worse when our walkie-talkies broke in the first minute of the operation, so we had to have someone on the ground communicating with hand signals.?

Despite the setbacks, the procedure was a success and Mrs Smith is looking forward to filling the gap once filled by the tree?s ample canopy with new plants.

She said: ?The garden looks completely different without the tree there. I haven?t got used to it yet.

?We?ve got plants that like shade which are now exposed to the sunlight so we need to replace it as quickly as possible.?