The only tree on Argyle Street arrived by accident, in the roots of a primrose. In the 1850s the first residents of a new tenement at Franklin Terrace came back from holiday with primroses for their scrap of front garden, and an ash seed came with them in the soil. Nobody wrote down the year, so its age of roughly 175 years is counted from that story rather than from a ring. By 1951, when James Cowan described it in From Glasgow's Treasure Chest, it stood 75 feet tall, about 23 metres, and had outgrown the building that planted it without meaning to. It went on to become the first tree in Glasgow to receive a Tree Preservation Order. In 2025 it was voted the UK's Tree of the Year, and in 2026 it represented the country at the European final, finishing twelfth. The better fact is that it is healthy. Ash dieback has been killing Britain's ash trees for years, and this one still carries more than three quarters of its canopy. The explanation usually given is loneliness: the nearest other ash is over 100 metres away, and a street of warm stone, dry paving and swept-up leaves is a poor home for the fungus. It is a street tree that survives partly because it is on a street. A local arborist, who nominated it for the contest, looks after it.
Outside 1223 Argyle Street (Franklin Terrace), Finnieston, Glasgow, Scotland You can recognise it by being the only tree on Argyle Street, an ash about 23 metres tall that rises above the tenement behind it. It stands in the small front garden strip outside 1223 Argyle Street, at Franklin Terrace.
Free. Stands on Argyle Street itself, the only tree on the street, in the small front garden strip of a tenement building at Franklin Terrace; visible and reachable from the public pavement, no entry needed.
Kelvinhall or Exhibition Centre subway/rail stations, both under 10 minutes' walk
