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churchyard yew. The yews planted two hundred years 

 ago by Gilbert White's grandfather in the parsonage 

 garden close by, are but saplings in comparison. A 

 black poplar would grow a bigger trunk in less than 

 ten years. The Selborne yew was indeed one of the 

 antiquities of the village when White described it a 

 century and a quarter ago. It is, moreover, the best- 

 grown, healthiest, and most vigorous-looking yew of its 

 size in Britain. The ' Farringdon yew, the bigger tree, 

 has a far more aged aspect the appearance of a 

 tree which has been decaying for an exceedingly long 

 period. 



Trees, like men, have their middle period, when 

 their increase slowly lessens until it ceases altogether ; 

 their long stationary period, and their long decline: 

 each of these periods may, in the case of the yew, 

 extend to centuries; and we know that behind them 

 all there may have been centuries of slow growth. 

 The Selborne yew has added something to its girth 

 since it was measured by White, and is now twenty- 

 seven feet round in its biggest part, and exceeds by 

 at least three feet the big yew at Priors Dean, and 

 the biggest of the three churchyard yews at Hawkley. 

 The Farringdon yew in its biggest part, about five 

 feet from the ground, measures thirty feet, and to 

 judge by its ruinous condition it must have ceased 

 adding to its bulk more than a century ago. One 

 regrets that White gave no account of its size and 

 appearance in his day. It has, in the usual manner, 



