Scots share stories of their favourite trees

I mentioned it to a friend. She and I were in the same women's group and a friend of hers had died from breast cancer. The brass plaque beside the tree was mottled and not very well looked after.

One day I saw my friend cleaning it. She told me that her friend who died had been active in the feminist economic movement and she was cleaning the plaque in her memory. The Glasgow Women's Library got involved and they campaigned for it to be Tree of the Year in 2015.

The Suffragette Oak makes me think about the forgotten history of these women: the hard work and striving that went unnoticed. Thanks to these women who went that extra mile, we now have the vote – we have a voice.

The tree was badly damaged in a storm last year and the council had to make it safe. The bits cut off were given to Glasgow Women's Library and they are making it into things to sell to raise funds. Isn't that lovely?

Another special tree was one I saw at a holiday place we rented at Achnacloich, near Oban. The gardens there have this amazing redwood that looks like a gigantic hand.

The reason it looks like a hand was that when it was planted a rabbit kept nibbling the bud in the middle. Every time this rabbit nibbled it, another shoot would come out the side. It was one of the first redwoods to be grown in Scotland.

We were staying there with loads of kids and it was the best climbing tree in the world – they would get lost in it. You would be sitting outside having a cup of tea in the morning and suddenly hear a wee voice from up in the tree asking: "What's your favourite flavour of crisps?"

Carole Baxter, Beechgrove Garden presenter

I LOVE rowan trees. All the species are beautiful. There is such a range of colourful berries and they are a hardy plant. In my garden in Aberdeenshire I have eight varieties including cashmiriana, Joseph Rock and the native rowan.

I have enjoyed the rowan for its berries as long as I can remember, certainly from a young age. It is a value-for-money plant: you have the blossom and fruits, lovely foliage and great autumn colour.

People perhaps aren't aware of the range of species and named varieties. You don't need to have the one that has the orange-red berries; you can get white, yellow and pink berries.

There are some small ones as well, such as Sorbus reducta which is ideal for a rock garden. We have that one at Beechgrove as well as vilmorinii, which has pink berries with almost blueish foliage. Those were my plant choices.

What is interesting is that birds tend to home in on the red and orange berries to start off with so, if you have cashmiriana with its white berries, it tends to hold the berries a bit longer.

This year has been particularly good for the fruits because we had a cold spring and it gradually got warmer, so we didn't have the frost and the blossoms weren't damaged, which was then followed by a nice hot summer.

It is nothing to do with the fact we are going to have a hard winter as people often say – that's an old wives' tale – it is the fact that we have had a good season.

Episodes of Beechgrove Garden are available on BBC iPlayer until November 27

• READ MORE: Scotland's 25 best-loved trees

Gordon Buchanan, wildlife filmmaker

SCOTS pine has been my favourite tree from a young age. I grew up on Mull and I have always loved woodland. I spent a lot of time as a kid walking through the woods.

One walk we did took us a mile or so out of Tobermory. When you are eight or nine, even just going a couple of miles out of town feels like you are exploring the other side of the planet.

It was while out walking that I first saw a Scots pine. It was one of those classic old "granny" pines with so much character, the limbs were all twisted – there was one that came out at a right angle and shot skywards.

This Scots pine stood among mixed birch and there was no other tree around it that looked the same. It seemed so exotic and out of place. Your eye was drawn to it.

As I got older and spent time in the Cairngorms and Abernethy Forest, I learned that much of Scotland was covered in forests filled with these trees. I thought it was the most magical habitat.

The tree then became a symbol for all the wildlife that you find living in those forests. I have spent time filming capercaillie as well as red deer, red squirrels and pine martens among the trees.

Weirdly, now I have travelled further than just a couple of miles out of town, whenever I see Scots pine, they don't look exotic to me. I have recently been working in Russia where there is mixed birch woodland and what I call "Caledonian Forest" – this reminder of home.

My love of Scots pine is undiminished but they have gone from being a symbol of the exotic to something very familiar.

A couple of years ago I was working in a mountainous region of Turkey and you could almost have been in the Cairngorms. It was very similar. I felt at home.

Animal Families and Me with Gordon Buchanan is at Kirkintilloch Town Hall on November 20, Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh on November 21 and Rothes Halls in Glenrothes on November 22

Kirsty Wark, broadcaster

A TREE is a marker, something you look out for at a particular time of year. My Japanese maple in the garden, for example, you just know when the leaves are going to turn, be vivid and then flutter to the ground.

The yellow-berried rowan is one of my favourite trees. I love lime trees because I think they are so vivid in the landscape.

Trees represent a constancy. Planting trees is entirely altruistic because, unless they are fast-growing, you are never in your lifetime going to get the real benefit of them. I love the fact that parks were laid out by the Victorians – and even much earlier with Lancelot "Capability" Brown.

After my father died, we planted a rowan where he loved to fish most, which was Kendoon Loch in Galloway. That was in 1994. It is beside the water and I'm not sure it is the most fertile place for it, but it is hanging on in there. I went to see it last week.

In Celtic mythology the rowan symbolises courage and protection. That is why you will often see old houses with rowans planted in the front garden by the gate. We planted a red rowan for Dad, but I really like a yellow rowan too.

I used to know the names of all the trees because I was in the Brownies. I don't know them all now. I love walking in the forest up to Glenashdale Falls and Whiting Bay on Arran, those specific spaces where you are surrounded by flora and fauna.

• READ MORE: Scotland's 25 best-loved trees

Sir John Lister-Kaye, author and naturalist

THERE is an ash tree that is one of the biggest trees in the garden here at House of Aigas near Beauly and almost certainly the oldest – it is possibly 350 years old. It is right beside the house.

Ash (Fraxinus excelsior) was a very valuable timber throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. It was used for all sorts of things – implement handles, cart frames, furniture.

It is a very good, close-grained hardwood. Very few ash trees ever survived more than 50 or 60 years, perhaps 100 years, because they were too valuable. Highlanders were not well off and it was a good way of making money.

There are very few old ash trees in the Highlands. This one has survived simply because it is so close to an 18th-century house and I think the owners must have said many times: "Don't fell that tree, we like it". And so it survived.

What is wonderful about it is that it has survived for so long and that means it has seen so much. For instance, it will have seen Bonnie Prince Charlie come through raising the clans which, of course, culminated in the Battle of Culloden.

It saw the folk mourning after the loss of Culloden and it saw Cholmondeley's regiment come and camp here and then burn the tacksman's house down right beside it. The tree must have been scorched by that fire. The Frasers who were living here at the time were all murdered in May 1746.

It has witnessed some real horrors. Later, it will have witnessed the Highland Clearances, people pulling out and leaving for the New World. It will have witnessed the Victorians arriving with their grand ideas and turning the place into a sporting estate.

This "loftier ash", as I call it – because that is what Fraxinus excelsior means – has seen a lot of history and for that reason alone it is a very valuable tree. In my book Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey, I dedicated a whole chapter to it.

Let me read you a bit from it: "The ash tree has witnessed it all. I stand at its foot. Great roots have corrugated the ground around it with broad woody thongs undulating outwards in a circular plate of tangle and deep grip, roots that trail far across the lawns in every direction.

"It is solid, purposeful, locked in. Its trunk writhes with power. It is all heart. My fullest reach, both arms stretched, extends to less than a third of its circumference; an inconsequential hug leaving me in awe of its rigid grandeur.

"Its bark is deeply grooved with long vertical ripples of hardness like a throng of ribbed buttresses all heading upward, shoring up its might, shedding veils of green dust at my touch.

"The bark fissures draw in treecreepers: those tiny mouse-like birds that dash upwards in little jerky pulses, defying gravity. Then, giving in to the earth's pull, they flick down again, back to start, like a game of snakes and ladders never won.

"I am enthralled by this tree, rapt. Every time I stand here, I shrink; it grows. I age; it shrugs off such foibles and just goes on expanding into a thousand shaded alleys. What is 10 minutes or a week when you are 300 years old?"

Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey by Sir John Lister-Kaye is published by Abacus, priced £9.99. Visit aigas.co.uk

Paul Murton, Grand Tours of Scotland presenter

A TREE that I have always admired is a rowan that grows from a huge boulder. It is one that everyone will have seen as they are driving north up the A82 to Fort William.

Just as you get to Rannoch Moor and are climbing up above Loch Tulla, there on the left-hand side of the road is a massive boulder left over from the Ice Age.

There is a crack in it where, for many years, this amazing little rowan tree has been growing.

It has been blasted by the elements and can't be getting many nutrients from the rock, so I don't know how it survives.

There is something quite symbolic about it. I have filmed it several times for programmes over the years. It also appears in one of my favourite books, Mountaineering in Scotland by WH Murray.

In fact, the first time I saw this rowan tree was in WH Murray's book when I was 13 or 14. I hitchhiked from Dunoon to Glencoe to go climbing and I remember seeing it in the flesh and thinking: "Oh, that's the one in the book".

That was exciting because I felt I was on the trail of real mountaineers. Any mountaineer who had been up to Glencoe going back decades will have seen that wee tree.

How did it end up there? Perhaps a crow or a raven carried a berry, dropped it and it then got stuck in a crack where there was enough nutrients for roots to grow. It must be at least 100 years old.

I'm a bit of a secret tree hugger. I planted a lot of trees at my mother's place in Argyll years ago and it is nice to admire how much they have grown. There are a couple of chestnut trees, beech trees and Scots pine.

Episodes of Grand Tours of Scotland's Lochs are available on BBC iPlayer until November 19. The series will be repeated on BBC2 in 2019

• READ MORE: Scotland's 25 best-loved trees

Greg McHugh, actor

I GREW up in Morningside in Edinburgh and at the bottom of the garden were steps down to a wood. There was a mud road with a wall and trees behind it. I loved spending time there.

All the kids in my street would go down and play. It was an incredible place. I know people think of Morningside as being posh, but this wasn't a kept space. It was completely wild and overgrown. My mum would always shout as I went out the door: "Don't go near the giant hogweed!"

It was this little hidden spot in the city. When I was in third year at school, I did a history project on it and learned that this was the old "poorhouse" road that had grown over.

To think of the families that would have walked up and down there, the trees have been witness to all of that.

We would gather conkers, climb and make rope swings among the trees and put old doors down over the stream. On fireworks night there would be a big bonfire and all the families in the street went along.

One of my brother's mates stood on a wasp's nest and was incredibly badly stung. Afterwards it gave spending time among the trees a new element of risk. The thing that sticks in my mind is that, while during the day it was our playground, we would never dare go down there at night.

The inaugural Scottish Tree Festival organised by Discover Scottish Gardens features more than 70 tree-themed events and runs until December 2. Visit discoverscottishgardens.org

Part Two in the Herald on Sunday: more fascinating tales of Scotland's most amazing trees