Yew

The Yew tree native to Scotland is the English Yew, the spreading form as opposed to the unique Irish yew that is tight and towering. The Irish Yew is commonly seen in graveyards, but so is the English Yew - the Irish introduced and the English Yew coming from native stock, though it is very rare in the wild. The trunk - in Gaelic ‘stoc’ – is rough and peeling and rusty ginger/brown, but when they reach great age Yews tend to hollow out in the middle, leaving a group or ring of trunks. Yew grows wild here and there in the South and North East, with an ancient but thin spread from Argyll and Loch Lomond into Perthshire. Yew lives longer than any other tree, and there is a Yew tree in Scotland that is the oldest living thing in all of Europe. Living a great age, and foliage being evergreen, are reasons why it came to be associated with Death and the Afterlife. In cemeteries, their dark foliage shadowing the gravestones, they are acting as a link between this life and the next, and the Yew has association with some of Scotland’s holiest places – the Isle of Iona that was once called Ioua, the chapel of Kilneuair near Loch Awe, and Tomnahurrich near Inverness, all names using ancient forms of Gaelic or Pictish for the Yew. Apart from shape and density the only other difference between Irish and English Yew is the needle-like foliage, which is curling on the Irish and straight on the English. In early Spring tiny flower buds form on the veins beneath needles and twigs the male becoming noticeable when the breeze lifts the veils of dark foliage to reveal the fine yellow dust of pollen as it is released. The female trees, receiving the pollen, produce little green seeds in pale green cups, the cups growing to enclose the seed and slowly turning to shiny translucent crimson as the year advances. The sticky flesh of the fruit is not poisonous, but the hard little seed inside is, as are the needles and twigs and other parts of the tree. Yew wood has been valued for making bows. Thousands of years ago a man walked across the high Border hills carrying a bow of yew. Thousands of years later Robert Bruce had his bows made from the yews of Loch Lomond and Argyll, and the Yew is the badge of the great warrior clan Fraser.