please help my mum

They look like Cupressus to me.

 

Why do some people think they can tackle something without taking advice from a profesional. Your poor mother must be deeply upset.
I know I was when I came back from holiday and found that my god daughter had chopped EVERYTHING down to ground level. I had watched it grow for 5 yrs and loved it.and it was decimated.
Anyway the good news is you now have a blank canvas and you can start again.
I would dig them all up and go to a specialist dealer and put in a largish tree that will be 14 ft high already. If she can afford to I would pay the �£100 diffenence to get 10-15 year head start.
I have just taken down 10 Leylandi and cant wait 20 years to hide my neighbours houses. I bought a Eucalyptus, Mallus a Prunus Nigra and a Betula . They have been in only 2 years and are covering the view nicely.
Otherwise you are in for a long wait to cover the houses.

 

I dont think she needs anything anywhere near 14 feet high to give privacy from those houses. That is why i asked for a photo from near the house. It seemed to me that the conifers were much higher than they needed to be to achieve the desired objective.
Some of the trees you mention would grow fast and cause the same problem of interfering with overhead cables, Betula grows faster than cupressus and eucalyptus is not far behind. I have a birch that was planted as a whip 20 years ago and it now over 40 feet.

 

Eucalyptus will want topping at least every four years to keep it managable, growth rate is close on 3' per year.

Lovely smell to chop up lol. Eucalyptus rather like robinia is valunerable to wind damadge so would not be the best bet in such a location.

 

I dont think she should plant more trees, maybe just a new fence and work from there

 

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:



That is some mental pruning !

 

thanks for all your help sorry for the delay but ive been working away, now we know these are ruined we are going to take the lot down leaving just a few feet so we can have a go at pulling the roots up.this will be after xmas so on another thread i will need your help at finding something nice but not as big. i have taken another picture from the other side for ghandley the first fence is not my mums and the garage is next doors my mums fence is the tree boundry

 

If you want to pull them then leave 6 ' of stump. Looking at your first photo and the proximity to the fence it looks to me that pulling will be impractical and a stump grinder a better option.

If you go down the pulling root you will need something very substantial to anchor too, in the past ive use larger retained trees with a webbing strap to protect the bark.

 

Dig around the base of the stumps ste and cut some of the bigger roots before you try and pull them it will make life a bit easier.

 

What i really meant was that you take a photo from just outside the back window of your Mum's house looking towards the houses that you want privacy from, or take a photo looking out from the kitchen window looking that way. Its a matter of estimating angles and the maximum height of the screening you would need. My first thought is that whatever you would need would not need to be higher than 6-8 feet which is easy to achieve and is easily maintainable.
However your photo does show how out of proportion those trees are. It will look bare at first but the privacy issue can soon be rectified.
Is that fence on the roadside behind the blue car your Mum's or does it belong to the neighbour attached to you Mum's house, so being semi detached?
Those look really big trees, I did not realise their size from the first photos. I suppose its because I can scale them from the houses.
Just had a look at the first photo. Does your Mum's garden actually have the road running alongside the side fence? if so I know which house it is, its not the one I thought it was in the paragraph above.
On the first photo you put up, what is the height of the fence panel from soil to top in the botton right hand corner,(last side panel, it will have the roafd behind)?