A WOMAN was reduced to tears as a historic tree was felled without warning.

Sylvia Harwood hurried outside her house in Hove to see the elm being removed.

“I woke up to the sound of chainsaws,” she said.

The giant tree had stood in Cranmer Avenue since she moved to the area in the 1970s as a teenager and she believes it was more than a century old.

Mrs Harwood said she was reduced to tears as she watched its branches being severed from the trunk and fed into a wood chipper.

The 67-year-old said: “I’m horrified, they are felling a completely healthy tree.

“To me, this is murder. They are murdering a tree for no reason.

“I’m absolutely heartbroken, it’s needless.”

She said she was later told it was an elm tree, and this only compounded the situation.

Brighton and Hove is home to a clutch of elms which survived Dutch elm disease, which virtually wiped out the UK’s elm population in the 1970s.

But the city has lost several of the trees to the disease recently, including one of the Preston Park Twins, two of the oldest elm trees in the world.

It had to be chopped down as a result.

Mrs Harwood said: “These trees have yellow notices on them, they are mourned, but they were chopped

down because they were diseased.

“This tree was healthy.”

She was upset she had not been notified the tree was to be cut down.

She was told it was being removed because it was affecting the drains of another house in the street.

A Brighton and Hove City Council spokeswoman said: “The decision to fell the tree was made following an insurance claim by a resident of Cranmer Avenue.

“Loss adjusters, appointed by the council, visited the property to assess the damage the tree was causing to the property and advised that the only way to mitigate the damage was to remove the tree.”

But Mrs Harwood argued the tree “could have been trimmed or managed” instead in order to save it.

She also said that, if she had been made aware early enough, a campaign could have been organised to stop the felling.

Mrs Harwood works as a nurse in the Seven Dials area and was part of a successful campaign in 2013 to save an elm tree there.

Brighton Pavilion Green MP Caroline Lucas joined the campaign and that tree was spared.

But, in this instance, the plant was not saved.

A council spokeswoman said: “Felling healthy trees is always a last resort for council’s arboriculture team, but in this case it was deemed necessary to prevent further damage.”