It’s the first time a Lithuanian tree has won the prize in the contest’s 15 annual iterations. The Oak of Laukai’s victory follows a change in the online voting system that used to favor bigger countries and last year fueled a bitter feud between Polish and Spanish tree lovers.
Poland has won the last four contests, mostly thanks to votes from followers of the Polish Instagram meme account Make Life Harder, which heavily promoted Polish entrants. But last year’s competition was soured by a campaign on a Spanish public TV comedy show featuring a sign calling the tree “a load of shit” and saying it smelled “like armpits.”
The tense atmosphere online and at the ceremony jarred with the contest’s aim of bringing communities together around a common love of nature.
Instead of tallying individual votes, organizers devised a system of “tree points” where a vote for a tree grown in a smaller country counted more than one given to a contestant from a bigger nation.
“I’m very grateful to my colleagues … who had enough courage to design this system and implement it,” said Petr Kazda, CEO of the Czech Environmental Partnership Foundation, which supports the event, at the ceremony.
From about 200,000 votes, the Oak of Laukai received 6,153 tree points, Slovakia’s apple tree 4,766 points and Poland’s elm 4,720 points. The United Kingdom’s Argyle Street ash, which towers over one of Glasgow’s main thoroughfares, finished last in 12th place with 536 points.
It is the Eurovision of trees indeed.