BOTANICAL NAME
Taxus baccata
DISTRIBUTION
Europe, North Africa and west Asia.
OLDEST KNOWN LIVING SPECIMEN
The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, Scotland: at least 2,000 years old, possibly 5,000 years old.
RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE
Held sacred by the early Indo-European peoples, such as Celtic and Nordic tribes.
MYTHICAL ASSOCIATIONS
Believed by ancient peoples to be immortal and a symbol of everlasting life.
CONSERVATION STATUS
Classified on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 2006 as of ‘least concern’.
The remarkable bark of an ancient yew tree.
There is something awe-inspiring and magical about an ancient yew. With its massive trunk and evergreen crown it must have appeared immortal to our ancestors, standing virtually unchanged for centuries – a silent witness to the passage of time. In the deepest, darkest months of winter, when the forests were at their coldest and most forbidding, the yew must have given hope to early man, not only by remaining resolutely green in the face of a diminishing sun, but by often becoming ablaze with flame-red berries and filled with the excited chatter of birds – an island of life and colour at the bleakest time of the year. No wonder the yew became so venerated, and perhaps no other tree is so deeply interwoven with the ancient history of Indo-European people, or holds the same fascination and sense of mystery.
In evolutionary terms, the yew is truly ancient: yew-like fossils have been found in rocks that are over 200 million years old, pre-dating the dinosaurs. With the development of carbon-dating techniques, palaeontologists have been able to date fossils with increasing accuracy, and fossilized remains of Taxus baccata, which are indistinguishable from the modern tree, tell us that the yew existed around 15 million years ago, flourishing in forests during the upper Miocene Epoch. In addition, the discovery of yew pollen preserved in some of Europe’s peat bogs has shown that yews were once much more numerous and widespread than they are today, at times forming a major constituent of European woodlands as far back as the Cromerian Interglacial Stage, which occurred between 750,000 and 450,000 years ago.
There are believed to be at least seven species of yew growing in the temperate forests of Asia, Asia Minor, India, Europe, North Africa and North America, but because of their similarity, some scientists feel that these may simply represent a series of variations or subspecies of Taxus baccata, the first yew ever to be scientifically described.
The distinctive dark green needles of the yew are highly toxic.
The common yew (Taxus baccata) can be found growing wild throughout most of Europe, extending from Scandinavia and Estonia in the north as far south as the mountains of North Africa, and from Ireland in the west to the Russian Caucasus in the east. Yews grow from sea level in Britain and north-western Europe to altitudes of up to 3,350m (11,000ft) in the Himalayas. Common yews may be a major component of mixed woodlands, or occur in pure stands as groves or clusters, especially on steep valley sides, although few such woodlands now remain in the modern landscape. However, yew trees appear to thrive better than many others on steep chalk slopes, and what is acknowledged to be one of the finest yew forests in Europe is found on the chalk downland of Kingley Vale in Sussex, England. Outside Europe, Georgia and north-eastern Turkey have some particularly fine stands of monumental yews.
Yews are a familiar sight in Christian churchyards and on ancient pagan burial sites.
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life is a common theme among the ancient cultures of the world – it stands at the centre of paradise in Judaic, Christian and Islamic mythology, and at the centre of the world in Hindu lore. It is also key to many shamanistic traditions across Europe and Asia. Although it is impossible to know which species these trees might really have been, since the origins of the Tree of Life pre-date written texts, late Stone Age and Bronze Age artistic representations of yew-like symbols have been found in Spain, Greece, Turkey, North Africa, Siberia and many other locations. The yew’s extraordinary ability to renew itself from decay and remain vigorous in the harshest of climates, and the symbolism of its blood-coloured fruit and blood-like exudates, must have been awe-inspiring to our ancestors. It is not hard to imagine how the yew could have found symbolic expression as the Tree of Life.
The snake-like roots of an ancient yew in the grounds of Waverley Abbey in Surrey.
Common yews are not famous for the great heights they reach, but for the enormously thick trunks that they form in old age. With their deep reddish- or purplish-brown bark, and trunks that are often deeply fissured and fluted, they can measure up to 16m (52ft) in girth, becoming hollow with age. Another distinctive feature is their majestic spreading crown of dark green foliage.
If left undisturbed, the lower branches of a yew will layer naturally when they touch the ground.
Yew wood is one of the strongest and most durable woods known. However, as it approaches old age (i.e. 800 years old or so), the tree begins a unique process of self-renewal. The interior of the trunk and main branches slowly begin to rot away, aided by the sulphur bracket fungus (Laetiporus sulphureus), and after centuries this might leave little more than a frail, hollow shell. Such hollows can be as much as 3m (10ft) across. Some of these have been put to ingenious uses – in the nineteenth century, the Crowhurst Yew in southern England (over 4,000 years old) was fitted out as a room with tables and chairs, and on one side a doorway was cut.
Although the tree becomes hollow, the yew’s life is by no means at an end then: this characteristic is part of the yew tree’s strategy for survival, enabling it to renew itself, over many hundreds of years, from the inside out. Whilst, on the outside, new wood will begin to grow over and encase the old shell, producing layers of different textures and colours with enormous tensile strength, a branch, or more than one, may grow down from the tree to embed itself in the soil in the middle of the hollow trunk, forming an interior root. In time, this will become an interior stem and, finally, a new trunk.
Another way for the yew to extend its lifespan is by branch layering: a branch or branches dip down and slowly grow towards the ground outside the tree. Roots develop and new trees will grow up from these points, eventually forming a circular grove. Left undisturbed, this process can continue indefinitely, so that further groves are formed. Sadly, no fully established examples of yew groves exist today. Most of the trees old enough to re-establish themselves in this way are situated in churchyards, where it has often been deemed necessary to cut off branches growing near the ground.
A rare pure yew stand in Dorset, south-west England.
The trunk of the magnificent yew at Crowhurst in Surrey could be 3,000 years old.
The hollow trunk of the Bettws Newydd Yew in Wales, which is 10m (30ft) in girth, with a new trunk developing inside.
Many ancient trees have had to adapt to environmental challenges. The roots of these yews appear to flow over solid rock and fuse with their surroundings.
The astonishing longevity of yews and their extraordinary ability to renew themselves from a state of great decay has set them apart from most other European trees and given rise to the concept of their immortality. As the late distinguished dendrologist Alan Mitchell said, ‘We’ve now more or less agreed that these trees can be more than 4,000 years old. In fact, there appears to be no theoretical end to this tree, no reason for it to die.’
The extremely slow growth rates of mature yew trees, and the fact that most ancient yews become hollow over time, makes assessing their age difficult. To make matters more complicated, growth in yew trees can be very uneven. Some yews apparently lie dormant for a very long time. The Totteridge Yew in north London, for example, has maintained the same girth for nearly 320 years while giving every outward impression of good health, while others, such as the Crowhurst Yew in southern England, may be growing by only infinitesimally small amounts over extended periods. The conventional method of dating trees, by counting their growth rings or by carbon-dating the oldest timber, is not applicable to ancient yews as they not only develop hollow trunks in old age but have the very rare ability among trees to renew themselves even when of great age. In general, the life of a tree can be divided into three main stages: formative, when the trunk and crown are growing; mature, when the tree has reached its optimum size for the growing conditions; and senescence, when it has outgrown its ability to feed itself and starts to die back. The yew tree conforms to this model with a period of vigorous early growth followed by several hundred years of steady mature growth. However, for most trees, once they enter the period of senescence, the decline to death is inexorable. Yew trees, however, have the capacity to renew themselves by a process of vegetative regeneration, so a tree that may have stood quietly for hundreds or possibly thousands of years and increased in size only by tiny increments over centuries can suddenly resume vigorous growth.
The pegs mark out the full extent of the trunk of the Fortingall Yew before it split into several sections. It is possibly the oldest tree in Europe, with an estimated age of between 2,000 and 5000 years old.
The fact, then, that yews do not conform to the general growth pattern shown by most other trees, and that tree ring and carbon-dating methods are redundant on hollow trees, makes an accurate calculation of their age particularly challenging. The dating of ancient yews has had to rely mainly on the extrapolation of growth curves drawn from careful studies of trees whose planting dates are known, and measurements of annual growth rings taken from exposed areas of trunk or branches, or from fallen pieces of ancient wood. This data is then carefully interpreted, taking into account local conditions such as climate, soil type and exposure to light (shaded or not). Even so, different researchers using similar data have often come up with widely varying estimates of age. Dendrochronologists John Tabbush and Paul White arrived at a formula for calculating the age of churchyard yews from observations of growth rates, which suggests that a tree of 7m (23ft) in girth would be about 1,580 years old. However, yews do not conform to the same growth patterns as other trees such as oak and beech, which are familiar to foresters. Recent research by the Ancient Yew Group (AYG) in the UK suggests that a yew tree of 7m (23ft) or more in girth should be considered to be ancient and at least 800 years old, but beyond this, estimates of age are very difficult to substantiate. This is partly because yews have a virtually unique way of growing, surviving and regenerating, including their ability to ‘return to formative’ (i.e. vigorous) rates of growth at almost any stage in their very long lives. In addition, yew trees show vast differences both in their response to a range of locations and conditions, and also in the way that different individual trees grow. Even yews planted at the same time and in very similar conditions can produce a remarkable range of individuals. At Monnington Walk in Herefordshire, for example, 42 yews were planted in 1628 but by 2003, the trees varied in girth from 1.47–4.42m (4ft 11in–14ft 9in).
Knowing what we do about the ability of yews to lie dormant for hundreds of years and the extremely slow growth rates of ancient trees, one can only speculate on the exact age of the yew at Fortingall in Scotland, whose trunk has now split, but which was measured in the late eighteenth century at about 16m (52ft) in girth. An estimate of 2,000 years would not be unreasonable, but it could be up to 5,000 years old in the opinion of some experts.
There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale, Which to this day stands single in the midst Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore: Not loth to furnish weapons for the bands Of Umfraville or Percy ere they marched To Scotland’s heaths; or those that crossed the sea And drew their sounding bows at Azincourt, Perhaps at earlier Crécy, or Poitiers. Of vast circumference and gloom profound This solitary Tree! a living thing Produced too slowly ever to decay; Of form and aspect too magnificent To be destroyed …
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770–1850), ‘THE PRIDE OF LORTON VALE’
The Ankerwycke Yew by the Thames at Runnymede is believed to have been the tree under which the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
The United Kingdom is believed to hold around 90 per cent of all the remaining ancient yews in Europe. The AYG’s records show that there are at least 318 ancient yew trees in the UK – that is trees with a girth of at least 7m (23ft), indicating an age of 800 years or older. However, the distribution of Taxus baccata spreads into Asia also, and many of the most interesting finds, as well as much of the most exciting recent research, are coming now from the Russian Caucasus and northern Turkey. Here, a number of stands of ‘monumental yews’, real giants of the yew kingdom, are to be found growing wild in broadleaf forests. Records from a study of one such fallen yew near Khosta showed that it had just over 1,000 tree rings in a trunk that measured a mere 50cm (20in) in radius. This has given rise to the calculation that yew trees growing in the Caucasus region of south-western Russia that are over 2m (6½ft) in diameter are likely to be over 3,000 years old. In the Batzvara Nature Reserve in the Georgian Caucasus, a tree known as the Patriarch Tree (or 2,000-Year-Old Tree), which has a diameter of just 1.5m (5ft), was recently shown, by researcher Karlo Amirgulashvili using dendrochronology, to be about 1,530 years old.
No one knows who first venerated the yew, but it appears to have been central to the ancient animistic religions of Europe and western Asia, which revered the fertility of nature and which honoured and celebrated its renewal each year. To adherents of these religions, evergreen trees were associated with immortality. The ancient celebration that marks the winter solstice is a festival that appears to have been held since the dawn of human history. A mass of archaeological and petroglyphic evidence suggests that a European yew cult, involving the worship of the tree’s scarlet fruits, its evergreen leaves and the golden pollen cloud of the male tree, is one of the oldest religious traditions known, and that it was from these that the ancient midwinter celebrations and the sophisticated beliefs represented by the Norse myths developed. The tree played a central part in the Nordic beliefs that held sway in the northern forests of Europe and which were marked by the worship of gods such as Odin and Ullr, the Norse god of archers, who was strongly connected to the yew. These in turn gave rise to belief in concepts such as Yggdrasil, a tree at the centre of the Earth with roots to the underworld, the land of the giants and the land of the gods. Later peoples, too, are known to have held strong beliefs associated with the yew – the Romans believed that it gave the souls of the dead safe passage to the afterlife, while the Saxons planted thousands of yew trees in Britain to mark the interment of their dead. Although it is difficult to determine the actual development of the Asiatic–European yew cult, it is likely that both people and religious ideas spread west across Europe, eventually reaching Britain in 4000 BC. The Celts, who reached their maximum range in the third century AD, are often associated with veneration of the oak, but yew trees were certainly sacred to them and were planted on their holy sites. Many Celtic tribes are known to have taken their names from the yew, such as the Iverni of southern Ireland. The etymology of the word ‘yew’ is fascinating: despite its many spellings in a range of ancient and modern languages across Europe, the sound remains virtually the same – yr in old Norse, yewar in Celtic, iva in Middle Latin and iubhar in Gaelic.
The Yew Longbow
There is evidence to suggest that yew weapons have been important to the people of Europe for tens of thousands of years. One of the oldest wooden artefacts ever discovered is a yew spear unearthed at Clacton in England, which was in use more than 200,000 years ago. Both Homer in Ancient Greece and Virgil in Ancient Rome noted that the best bows were made of yew wood. It is estimated that at one point in the Battle of Agincourt between Britain and France in 1415, around 70,000 arrows rained down on the French in a single minute.
Today, very few ancient yew trees are to be found in the wild in Europe. It is only in parts of Asia, such as Georgia and northern Turkey, that ancient common yews can still be seen gracing the hillsides alongside other woodland trees. Why is it that the UK holds such a high proportion of Europe’s remaining ancient yews? And why are they so rare throughout the rest of Europe? The answers to these questions are largely to be found under the headings of ‘War’ and ‘Religion’. Yew trees were a typical component of the wildwoods that stretched right across Europe during each of the interglacial periods for hundreds of thousands of years. We are in an interglacial period in the present era, so why are wild yew trees so rare? The answer is that their destruction has been a catastrophic by-product of war. For thousands of years, yew wood was utilized as the finest material for making longbows, which were used for hunting. However, it was the medieval decree of King Edward I that was to signal the beginning of the mass destruction of yew trees across Europe. Edward decreed that every man in the British Isles should possess a yew bow and arrows, but by the time Edward II was on the throne, in the early 1300s, demand had already outstripped local supply and yew wood was being imported from Ireland and Spain. Soon these countries ran out of yew trees too, and an international trade developed, encouraged by the discovery that the Continental yews, which grew at higher altitudes, made finer weapons. The yew bow became the main weapon of war for about 400 years and the demand was colossal. Yew timber was imported into Britain from Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Spain and many other European locations. The money earned made countries and principalities hugely wealthy, but led to the destruction of millions of yew trees. Records exist that support the estimate that in an 80-year period in just one area of southern Germany and Austria alone, 1,600,000 yew staves were exported. Surmising that this level of export was maintained across Europe for hundreds of years, we can get some idea of the extraordinary magnitude of the destruction. There seem to be two reasons why most of Europe’s remaining ancient yews are to be found in the UK. Firstly, British yews, it appears, were not as good for making longbows as those from Continental Europe. The second reason is related to their location (at least the location of a great many of them) within the sanctuary of churchyards. There is evidence to support the fact that people avoided felling trees on consecrated ground and other yews that were considered sacred. It is curious that today, despite the fact that the UK is the home of most ancient European yews, it is also the country with the least protection afforded to these magnificent trees. Countries such as Germany and Austria have strict laws to protect yew trees, as does Georgia, whose laws to protect their monumental yews have already been in existence for nearly 100 years.
Ancient yew tree in the graveyard at Woolland Church in Dorset.
