大象传媒

Discovering that Britain’s – possibly Europe’s - widest yew tree was growing in one of our featured gardens in Staffordshire was an exciting moment. The 350-year old tree has a canopy the size of the Royal Albert Hall in London, so we’re talking big!

Deciding how best to demonstrate its huge girth caused much head scratching. We knew that we could film it from above but were worried that its dark green mass would just blend in with the field it grows in. The last thing we wanted was for this to be a “so what?” moment.

We knew that enlisting the help of the people of Staffordshire was the way forward. The plan was to gather people together and ask them to join hands and encircle the giant tree, but the question was, how many would we need? In order to come up with a figure, five staff members from the Shugborough estate walked around the tree with their arms outstretched. They came up with a number. Now all we needed to do was recruit them.

The 大象传媒’s network of local radio stations came to the rescue. 大象传媒 Radio Stoke did a “shout out” for us, and our presenter Christine agreed to be interviewed on their morning Drive Time programme. On the way, Christine found herself stuck in a traffic jam en route to the studio. The only thing to do was to pull over into a layby and do the interview down the phone.

It was a great success: the Shugborough team’s calculations proved spot on and all but one of the necessary numbers turned up on the day – the last place was taken by Jamie, one of our drone camera operators. And in case you are wondering, it takes over 160 people to encirlce the tree!