Sorry to hear about your trees Brian. We had the "tree surgeon" in last week to give our three, one hundred foot high Lime trees a health-check survey.
They all have TPO's on them - my immediate right-hand neighbour has five trees, and we all like trees. That is more than can be said for the neighbours at the rear! It's not continuous, but they moan about the falling leaves in the autumn (there are a lot

), the lack of sunshine, they cannot get SKY and waking up in the morning to this high green wall is depressing.
Thankfully the tree surgeon (he had letters after his name - so I assume he knew what he was talking about), said the trees were absolutely fine, and there would be no justification in removing (thinning/pollarding) any branches from the trees. He said there were a couple of dead branches which could be removed (without planning permission) at the end of the year. We will not be giving the rear neighbours a copy of the report - they can move house. The trees have been there since about 1800 - the houses 1977.
The picture shows the right-hand tree is denser than the other two, this is because a large top portion of the tree came down in the 1987 storm - natures way of "thinning" - this is what would happen to the other trees if they were worked on.
IMG_0984 by
Barry Clayton, on Flickr