Death, the Longbow, and a Cancer Drug

The yew's association with death is doubled by its use in weaponry: the medieval English and Welsh longbow was cut from yew, whose combination of springy sapwood and compression-resistant heartwood makes an unmatched self-bow, so that the tree of the graveyard was also the tree of the arrow. In Celtic and Norse tradition the yew is a tree of the ancestors and of endurance, sometimes linked to the runic letter eihwaz. In a modern turn that the old herbals could not have foreseen, compounds from yew (the taxanes, first isolated from the Pacific yew) became important chemotherapy drugs, a genuine medical development noted here as fact, and one that does not make any part of the raw plant safe to handle or ingest.

Because clippings and hedge trimmings retain their toxicity even after wilting, and because livestock will sometimes eat yew that fresh growth would otherwise deter them from, accidental yew poisoning of cattle and horses remains a real and recurring modern agricultural hazard, and many regions with a farming tradition still maintain specific guidance and, in places, regulation on disposing of yew clippings safely away from grazing animals. Yews are also remarkable for sheer age: several churchyard yews in Britain are claimed to be two to three thousand years old, among the oldest living organisms in Europe, though exact ages are genuinely hard to verify, since old yew trunks typically hollow out, destroying the growth rings a scientist would otherwise count.