6o 
FLORA AND SVLVA 
and take no note of its natural beauty 
upon our hills. A poet is supposed to 
recognise beauty wherever it be found, 
yet their eyes seem shut to the charm 
of the Yew ; it is none the less our 
finest native evergreen tree, and, like 
fresh air and spring water, among the 
good things that are neglected. We see 
people making hedges of it, and stuffing 
it away in shrubberies, and all the while 
taking immense pains to grow Cali- 
fornian Pines that will never do any 
good in our country. We never see 
them taking the trouble to grow the 
Yew as it should be grown. The warm 
green of its foliage during winter in some 
soils is a distinct charm, and there is 
the fine colour of the stem of an old 
Yew tree. Often planted in hedges, 
and allowed to take the tree form, it 
is too crowded to show this. The toss 
and sway of the branches in a high wind, 
is one of the most beautiful effects we 
know among evergreen trees. But we 
cannot see these things where the trees 
are distorted by crowding and clipping, 
or where it is mutilated at the roots as 
in graveyards, though it is remarkable 
what fine character the tree shows even 
under these trials. Gardeners and plant- 
ers are not kind to the Yew, and to see 
it in its finest state we must go to the 
hills of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent, its 
most picturesque home being in that 
grand " cup " of the Sussex Downs, near 
Chichester. In such free conditions we 
see the Cedar-like beauty of the tree 
and also its fine stem colour. Every 
tree-lover should see the Yew at its 
best, and then the dismal wail of the 
poets would count no more. And it 
Area. 
will be noted that one of the good points 
of the tree is its thriving on chalk-hills 
— to which so many trees are averse — 
so helping us to add evergreen trees of 
high value to the dreary and barren 
downs and wastes that cover so large 
an area in the southern counties. 
The area of the Yew covers 
the greater part of Europe, 
from Portugal and Spain to the Cau- 
casus, and from Scotland to the Medi- 
terranean . In western Europe it prefers 
the mountainous regions, rising to 487 
feet in the Pyrenees, and though some- 
times met with in the plains, steep places 
■ and cool hills seem to suit it best. I 
' have seen it among the Cedars in North 
Africa, growing on the cool mountain 
tops, far above the scorching plains and 
barren hills of Algeria. It is also found 
in other warm countries, such as India, 
where the ground rises high enough for 
it to find cool conditions. In the cool 
climate of ourgreen island, it is as happy 
on the plains as upon the hills, though 
left to itself it always shows a prefer- 
ence for rising ground. 
Recent evidence seems to shov/ that 
the Yew is fast disappearing in Europe, 
from regions in which it was once com- 
mon. Prof Conventz of Dantzig who 
has made a special study of it, shows 
that it formerly abounded in Scandi- 
navia and the north of Germany, but 
of recent years has disappeared so fast 
before the spread of civilisation as to 
have practically ceased to exist in large 
tracts of country, and is threatened with 
extinction as a wild tree. He adds 
" Increasing cultivation of the soil has 
completely changed and in a great 
