Holmwood's Giant Redwoods

Alexander 'Greek' Thomson's Holmwood is famous for its architecture, a villa modelled so closely on classical Greek temples that its own guidebooks call it his masterpiece, and for years little attention went to what was actually growing in its garden. That changed when the National Trust for Scotland's PLANTS project, a survey set up to catalogue what its properties' grounds actually contain rather than assume the historical record already covers it, worked through Holmwood's parkland and found two Giant Redwoods the trust's own records had barely registered, plus a Himalayan deodar cedar keeping them company. At around a century old, both sequoias are younger than the villa itself, planted well after paper magnate James Couper commissioned the house in 1857, and younger still than California's oldest specimens of the same species, some of which are pushing 3,000 years and eighty metres tall. Glasgow's pair share the same silhouette in miniature: a straight, buttressed trunk and soft, rope-like bark that a curious visitor can press a thumb into without hurting the tree. Whoever planted them was following a very Victorian fashion; seed brought back from California's Sierra Nevada groves after 1853 turned half of aspirational Britain's gardens into pocket-sized redwood forests, and Holmwood's pair survived to become, by complete accident of record-keeping, one of the last things about the estate anybody thought to write down.