III. — THE COMMON YEW. 
Taxus baccata Linne. 
F EW trees have such interesting associations with social and religious history, 
folk-lore, and poetry as the Yew, whilst botanically it also occupies a very 
isolated position. The majority of the types included in the Order Taxacea belong 
to the Southern Hemisphere. Though we need not follow Sir Joseph Hooker 
in considering all Yews, including the Californian and Japanese forms, as merely 
varieties of our well-known species, they undoubtedly constitute a group as 
structurally compact as it is geographically widespread. 
Luxuriating in warm calcareous or sandy soils, but by no means exacting in its 
requirements in this respect, the Yew is a deep-rooted tree. In the Himalaya it 
even grows to ioo feet in height ; but with us it rarely reaches half that height and 
is sometimes a mere bush. 
Although it has been estimated that the increase of the diameter of the stem 
may not exceed a line a year throughout its life, this may, considering the great girth 
of some trees, represent a very fair total cubic amount of wood ; and undoubtedly 
exaggerated estimates of the age of large Yew-trees have been arrived at by ignoring 
a striking characteristic in their mode of growth. The Yew possesses exceptional 
powers of developing new shoots from dormant and secondary buds ; and it is to 
this capacity that it owes its employment in clipped hedges and in the once favourite 
“ topiarian ” gardening. A large and ancient Yew, for instance, in the churchyard at 
Harlington, Middlesex, which in the eighteenth century was fantastically clipped into 
spires and balls, has at present every appearance of an untouched tree. At a 
comparatively early age some of the branches may grow erect so as to give the tree 
several leaders ; and later on many shoots rise erect around the base of the stem and 
become eventually enclosed in a common bark, thus giving rise to a fluted stem of 
deceptively great dimensions, which, if cut through, would exhibit many distinct 
centres of growth. 
The rosy-tinted bark which comes away in thin papery flakes is characteristic of 
a growth which is certainly slow ; as is also the fact that the dark-green leathery 
foliage remains on the tree for from four to eight years ; and, as a result of this slow 
growth, no European conifer is as tolerant of shade as is the Yew. On the other 
hand, so deep is the shade which it itself casts that there is less vegetation beneath it 
than beneath any other species. 
The leaves are borne singly and in a spiral round the shoots ; they have very 
short stalks, are from a third of an inch to an inch and a half long, with parallel 
sides, a pointed apex, a polished upper surface and a paler green lower one. Though 
in seedlings and erect shoots the leaves continue to radiate in all directions, on the 
lateral branches, by a slight twisting of their stalks, they are all reduced to two rows 
lying in one plane like the barbs of a feather. 
