Virginia Woolf's Oak and Wordsworth's Yews Shortlisted for Tree of the Year 2025

The Woodland Trust has announced its Tree of the Year shortlist which features two examples that inspired Virginia Woolf and William Wordsworth.

Highlighting the central part trees play in our lives and our cultural history, the shortlist of 10 features the 135ft tall Knole Park oak at Knole Park in Kent, at least 150 years old and believed to be the oak that features in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando which was inspired by the country house now managed by the National Trust. 

Woolf's protagonist Orlando "walked very quickly uphill through ferns and hawthorn bushes, startling deer and wild birds, to a place crowned by a single oak tree. It was very high, so high indeed that nineteen English counties could be seen beneath, and on clear days thirty, or forty perhaps, if the weather was very fine." The oak inspires Orlando to write his long poem The Oak Tree, a recurring motif in the book, which Orlando eventually buries at the foot of the tree.

Also among the frontrunners are the 2,000 year old Borrowdale Yews, in Seathwaite, Cumbria, described by William Wordsworth in his 1803 poem ‘Yew Trees’: 

"…those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,  
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;  
Huge trunks! – and each particular trunk a growth  
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine  
Up-coiling and inveterately convolved…" 

Wordsworth mentions four yews, but only three remain standing after one went down in a huge 1884 storm, now lying next to the other three. Although they seem to be separate trees, DNA research has shown that they in fact all grew from the same original tree. 

A third literary contenter is the Wilfred Owen sycamore in Edinburgh. More than a century old, this tree grows at Edinburgh Napier University, formerly the military psychiatric hospital known as Craiglockhart War Hospital where young poet Wilfred Owen was sent in 1917 to recover from shell-shock suffered during the First World War. He met fellow poet and mentor Siegfried Sassoon at the hospital and it is likely that they sat beneath this sycamore during their rehabilitation. 

“Our oldest trees hold more stories than Shakespeare," said actor Judi Dench, patron of the Woodland Trust. "Some were putting down roots long before he began writing, more than 400 years ago. They are as much part of our heritage as any literature.”

After a public vote open until September 19, the winning tree will represent the UK in the upcoming European Tree of the Year competition.