Yew

The yew, Taxus baccata, is a dark, dense evergreen of extraordinary longevity, some British churchyard yews are credibly well over a thousand years old, and a few may be far older, older than the churches beside them. That longevity, together with its evergreen foliage and its habit of regenerating from within a hollowed trunk, made it a natural emblem of death and of life persisting through death, and yews were planted in burial grounds long before and long after the arrival of Christianity in Britain. The tree is also deeply toxic: nearly all of it, foliage and seed, contains taxine alkaloids that are lethal to livestock and people, the fleshy red aril around the seed being the only non-poisonous part.

A single specimen often cited as the oldest living thing in Europe is the Fortingall Yew, growing in a Perthshire churchyard in Scotland, whose age has been estimated anywhere from several hundred to as much as five thousand years by different methods, since ancient yews hollow out from the centre and lose the growth rings that would otherwise date them precisely; whatever its exact age, it was already renowned as remarkably old when first recorded by antiquarians in the eighteenth century.

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.