The King's Park Yews

Most of the ancient-looking yews scattered through Britain's churchyards got there because someone wanted shade over graves. These 88 got here because a Glasgow merchant who had made his fortune in the West Indies trade wanted his new estate to look established. When architect David Hamilton laid out the grounds of Aikenhead House for its owner, John Gordon, in the early 1800s, he planted a formal grove of yews on rising ground east of the mansion, then a second, larger avenue of them a little later in imitation of the first. A specialist survey of the site in 2021 confirmed what the difference in trunk girth already suggested: the smaller eastern grove of 22 trees is measurably older and larger than the 66 planted afterward, some girthed at over four metres. The mansion the yews were planted to flatter had itself replaced an even older house on the same spot, one built for a 17th-century Lord Provost of Glasgow that burned down long before. Aikenhead House passed out of private hands in 1930, when developer Sir John MacTaggart gave the house and its 68 acres of parkland to the city as King's Park. The yews needed no care to survive that change of ownership: they simply kept growing, dark and unhurried, while the mansion around them changed hands, uses, and eventually postcodes.