A COUPLE in Chandler's Ford had a narrow escape after they noticed that a 60-foot tree in their garden was becoming uprooted.

Woken by the Monday morning storm, they peered out of an upstairs window and saw the silver birch, just feet from their home, totter as its roots loosed their grip on the ground.

"My husband could see the base of the tree moving," Anne Thick said.

Fearing that the skyscraper tree would crash onto their chalet bungalow, her husband, Gordon, said they should go down to the ground floor immediately and shelter there.

"But the tree fell before we got downstairs," Anne said.

Luckily the birch missed the house, in Gordon Road, and landed relatively harmlessly across two gardens.

The base of the trunk and the roots fell back into the ground when the rest of the trunk was sawn away.

Pictured next to the base are Anne and Gordon (right) with their son, David Phillips, and his daughter, Bethany. Mr Phillips used to be a tree surgeon so he was able to saw the tree into sections.

Anne said she was sorry to see the end of the tree, as the family had planted it as a seedling in 1987, the year of the Great Storm.