Yew
Taxus baccata
It was old before the church was built around it. It will be here after.
Overview
The yew does not age the way other trees age. It hollows, collapses inward, sends up new growth from the fallen trunk, and continues. The oldest yew in Britain — the Fortingall Yew in Perthshire — is estimated at somewhere between two and five thousand years old, an uncertainty that says as much about our instruments as about the tree. It grew in sacred groves before the first Christian churches were built on those same sites, and the yews in English churchyards are in most cases older than the churches that stand beside them. The tree was there first. The dead were buried there second. The association between yew and death is not metaphorical — it is the result of two thousand years of burying people under the same trees. Everything about the yew — the toxic seeds in their red arils, the wood that makes the finest longbows, the bark that gave us the cancer drug taxol — belongs to the threshold between killing and keeping alive.
Botanical Notes
A slow-growing, very long-lived evergreen tree or shrub reaching 10–20 metres with dark, deeply fissured, reddish-brown bark. Flat, dark green needles arranged in two ranks on the shoots. Male and female flowers on separate trees; the fruit is a single seed enclosed in a fleshy, bright red aril. Found in woodland on chalk and limestone throughout Europe; commonly planted in churchyards and formal gardens. Almost every part of the tree — bark, needles, seeds — contains taxine alkaloids, which interfere with cardiac calcium and sodium channels. The red aril alone is non-toxic; the seed within it is highly toxic.
Lore & History
Celtic and Germanic peoples considered the yew the tree of death and rebirth — its hollow trunks were associated with passage between worlds, and it appeared in divination and necromantic rites. The Anglo-Saxon rune Eihwaz represents the yew and carries connotations of endurance, death, and what lies beyond. In the Highlands, yew was used for weapon handles as well as coffin planks — the same wood for killing and for carrying the dead. Taxol, isolated from the Pacific yew in the 1960s and now a primary chemotherapy drug for several cancers, gave the tree a modern identity as life-giver that sits uneasily with its older one — though the yew, of all trees, would find the irony unremarkable.
Warnings
All parts except the fleshy red aril are acutely toxic. Taxine alkaloids act rapidly on cardiac tissue — symptoms include nausea, dizziness, bradycardia, and cardiovascular collapse within hours of ingestion. Children are attracted to the red berries; the aril is safe but the seed inside must not be chewed or swallowed. Deaths from yew poisoning are documented in every century. Do not burn yew wood indoors — the smoke contains taxine. Livestock fatalities from yew clippings thrown over garden walls are common. Handle prunings with gloves.