One hundred of Scotland's most significant trees have been recognised as part of Treefest Scotland 2002, a festival of over 800 events celebrating trees, woods and forests all over the homeland of Robert the Bruce. To learn more, take a look at the web - no spider this time! - as the "100 Heritage Trees of Scotland" project is internet-based. 

Visit www.treefestscotland2002.org.uk/heritage to discover Scotland's most historically noteworthy and culturally significant trees. You'll learn about the rarest, most ancient, tallest, most interesting, widest, and most unusual trees north of the border. As Forestry Minister Allan Wilson remarked recently, whilst praising the project, "Scotland can be proud of its extraordinary legacy of heritage trees, which are a national treasure unrivalled in Europe." 

Indeed, over the last year the Forestry Commission has left no leaf unturned to discover these remarkable trees. Now, with its Treefest partners, it's not only revealing some of the weirdest, most bizarre trees in Scotland, it's also telling the stories that lie beneath many more - including those which boast a royal heritage, those which pre-date St. Andrew and those which were formerly used as the local gallows! 

Many of the trees listed are accessible to the public, and the project certainly caught the public’s imagination, with nominations for noteworthy trees being sent from all over Scotland. This was whittled down to a short-list of more than 150 trees, from which an expert panel then selected the prestigious “100 Heritage Trees Of Scotland”. Whilst the panel’s top choices have now been revealed, Heritage Trees Chairman James Ogilvie says “we believe there are other remarkable and unusual trees still out there that we don’t know about, and we would still like to hear about them”.