There are three honest answers: manage it indefinitely, change the garden around it, or replace it. Most people only consider the first.
Manage it on a cycle, adapt the garden around it, or remove and replant with something that fits.
Which is right depends on whether the tree is worth the commitment — and on a mature specimen in an established garden, it very often is.
The last of these is the commonest, and it is nobody's fault in particular. A great many garden trees were planted as small specimens with no clear idea of their mature size, and forty years later the result is a magnificent tree in a position that cannot really hold it.
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This is the option people consider least and it is frequently the best. If a tree has outgrown its position, one answer is to change what the position is for. Shade planting instead of a struggling lawn beneath it. A seating area under the canopy rather than in the sun it now blocks. Bark or gravel where grass will not grow. A path routed round it rather than through it.
Removal is permanent, may need consent, and a mature tree cannot be replaced in the time most people own a house. It is the right answer sometimes and a great deal less often than it is asked for.
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Manage it on a cycle, adapt the garden around it, or remove and replant with something that fits. Most people only consider the first.
Reduction typically every three to five years for as long as you own the garden. That is reasonable if you want the tree — it is only a problem if nobody mentioned it at the outset.
Planting for shade instead of a struggling lawn, moving the seating area to where the sun now falls, using bark or gravel where nothing grows, and rerouting paths.
Usually, over time. It costs once rather than every four years, and a mature tree is often worth more than whatever it is preventing.
Where the species is genuinely wrong for the position, or where the management cycle is more than you want. But you lose fifty years, which is the real cost.
Not realistically. Transplanting a mature tree is not a practical option in a garden setting.
No. Pruning the crown does not affect the root system, so it is not the remedy for root concerns.
Possibly. Check with Bristol City Council for a Tree Preservation Order or conservation area status before doing anything.
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