Mum-of-two Julie Colley leapt out of bed when she heard an "enormous crash" as the poplar in her back garden snapped off at the trunk.

She said she rushed to the bedroom where her son Kairo was screaming in his bunk bed just before 6am yesterday.

Now Mrs Colley, 43, fears two more large poplars in her next-door neighbours' garden will do the same.

The headteacher said: "Kairo was screaming. I picked him up out of his bed and looked out of the window. Because it was still dark though just a branch had come off.

"My teenage son Lamin ran outside and shouted 'Mum, it's the whole tree'."

She went downstairs into her kitchen conservatory to find it demolished by giant branches which were now resting on her kitchen table with rain lashing through a huge hole in roof.

Husband Morikebba, known as Mori, had minutes earlier set off for work from the semi in North Grove Rise, Oakwood, Leeds. He said: "I'd just got on the bus when Julie rang me saying the tree had come down. My first though was for Kairo who sleeps in the back bedroom.

"There is a lot of damage, but if the tree had fallen to the right instead of the left it would have hit Kairo's bedroom.

"We normally sit at that table to eat."

The tree is one of three growing in the back gardens of Mrs Colley and her two neighbours.

Mrs Colley, who works at Highfield Primary School in Moortown, said: "When we moved in it said on the deeds that the trees were under a protection order. We're really worried now about the other two."

Mr Colley, a senior IT officer with Leeds City Council, said: "I don't care if I have to got to court, those trees are coming down."
Neighbour and mum-of-three Kirsty Larkin, 37, added: "My husband Ian heard the tree come down and my eldest son James came into the bedroom crying, saying there'd been an earthquake.

"I'm sending my kids to sleep with their grandparents until this is sorted. I'm scared stiff."

Andrew Cook, from Aspect Forestry, was called to the scene by Mrs Colley who was advised by the fire brigade to have the other trees felled.

He said: "It appears water has been leaking into the trunk and rotted the gut of the tree. They look like they've come to the end of their useful life."