The Armistice Tree
Today I am heading north of the city to meet an old friend of the Oxford Sausage, the biologist and artist Emma Coleman Jones. She is drawing a tree in the gardens of St Hugh’s College, which she thinks might interest me. And though at first, I am surprised to learn that it is a Magnolia soulangeana, whose glorious goblet shaped blooms don’t come good until the spring, I soon discover that the tree is also known under a different name. The Armistice Tree. A gift from students over a hundred years ago in 1919 to mark the signing of the treaty that ended the First World War on the 11th November 1918. An event still memorialised at this time every year, and in truth a more than appropriate reason to visit.