The Suffragette Oak

Not every remarkable tree here began as a sapling nobody thought twice about. This one was planted as a protest made permanent: on 20 April 1918, days after the Representation of the People Act gave some British women the vote for the first time, suffrage campaigner Louisa Lumsden planted a Hungarian oak in Kelvingrove Park on behalf of the Glasgow Society of Women's Suffrage, the Scottish Universities Suffrage Union, the Women's Freedom League and the United Suffragists, groups that had spent years disagreeing on tactics and, for one afternoon, planted a tree together instead. The Women's Committee of Glasgow City Council added a plaque in 1995 on International Women's Day, and in 2015 the Glasgow Women's Library campaigned it to a public vote as Scotland's Tree of the Year, beating five other historic finalists. Storm Ophelia found it in October 2017, stripping around a third of its canopy and tearing its trunk; council arborists reduced its height and rebalanced the crown to save it rather than remove it, and the timber that came down was carved into earrings, coasters and trinket boxes sold by the Women's Library. Now well over a century old and visibly reshaped by that storm, it stands a short walk from Glasgow University, one of the few trees in Britain planted specifically to mark a fight for the vote rather than a coronation or a laird's coming of age.