Good morning. Today is octidi, the 18th of Pluviôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le bois d'if, the evergreen tree of eternal death.
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Yew trees live forever. However, if you look up a list of the oldest trees on the planet, there's hardly a yew to be seen. What gives? The problem is that we can only estimate the ages of very old yews (and these estimates run into the several thousands of years). We can't count the rings, because yew heartwood rots after about 400 years, hollowing out the trunk. The tree then has the remarkable ability to grow new roots from the interior hollow, providing stability and a steady source of nutrients to grow ever outward. The upper limit of how long a yew can stay alive in this way can only be guessed at. For the yews with definitive-ish ages, the birthdays are marked by circumference measurements taken a meter from the ground every year – some of these records dating back 300 years or more – and extrapolating from there. This is how the Llangernyw Yew in Wales gets its ripe old age marker of 4,000 years, give or take a few centuries. According to dendrologist Alan Mitchell, “Most trees look older than they are, except for yews which are even older than they look.”
The yew is a death machine.
Agatha Christie turned to the yew (albeit for a red herring) in the (no spoilers) plot of A Pocket Full of Rye.Despite Olivier's mistranslation of the herb as hemlock, it's generally agreed that the poison Claudius pours in Hamlet's father's ear is a decoction of yew seeds. And in the real world, archers would make their arrows from yew wood (then tip the arrowheads with that decoction of yew seeds for good measure) in order to poison their targets.
Yews are one of the most toxic trees on the planet. They are also beautiful, and long-lived, and associated with graveyards, where superstition has it that they feed on the underground fumes of corpses to fuel their unnaturally long lifespans.
