Taxus baccata
Encyclopedia : T : TA : TAX : Taxus baccata
Taxus baccata is a conifer native to western, central and southern Europe, northwest Africa, northern Iran and southwest Asia. Originally and still widely known in English as just Yew, the later discovery of other very similar related species has led to qualification as European Yew, Common Yew or English Yew where detail of which species of Taxus is required. The word yew is from Proto-Germanic *īwa-, possibly originally a loanword from Gaulish ivos, compare Irish ēo, Welsh ywen, French [if]; see Eihwaz for a discussion). Baccata is Latin for bearing berries.
It is a small to medium-sized evergreen tree, growing 10-20 m tall, exceptionally up to 28 m. It is relatively slow growing, but can be very long-lived, with the maximum recorded trunk diameter of 4 m probably only being reached in around 4,000 years. The potential age of yews is difficult to determine, as there is rarely any wood as old as the whole tree and the bough often hollows out with time; there are unconfirmed age estimates as high as 5,000-9,000 years.(Lewington and Parker, 71)
It has thin scaly brown bark. The leaves are lanceolate, flat, dark green, 1-4 cm long and 2-3 mm broad, arranged spirally on the stem, but with the leaf bases twisted to align the leaves in two flat rows either side of the stem except on erect leading shoots where the spiral arrangement is more obvious.
The seed cones are highly modified, each cone containing a single seed 4-7 mm long partly surrounded by a modified scale which develops into a soft, bright red berry-like structure called an aril, 8-15 mm long and wide and open at the end. The arils are mature 6-9 months after pollination, and with the seed contained are eaten by thrushes, waxwings and other birds, which disperse the hard seeds undamaged in their droppings; maturation of the arils is spread over 2-3 months, increasing the chances of successful seed dispersal. The male cones are globose, 3-6 mm diameter, and shed their pollen in early spring. It is mostly dioecious, but occasional individuals can be variably monoecious, or change sex with time.
All parts of the tree are highly toxic, except the bright red aril surrounding the seed, enabling ingestion and dispersal by birds.
Uses and traditions
In the ancient Celtic world, the yew tree (*eburos) had extraordinary importance; a passage by Caesar narrates that Catuvolcus, chief of the Eburones, virtually "sons of the yew", poisoned himself with yew rather than submit to Rome (Gallic Wars 6: 31). Similarly, Florus notes that when the Cantabrians were under siege by the legate Gaius Furnius in 22 BC, most of them took their lives either by the sword or by fire or by a poison extracted ex arboribus taxeis, that is, from the yew tree (2: 33, 50-51). In Hispania, Prudentius (Contra Simacum 2: 1005-1011) and Martin of Braga in Visigothic times (De correctione rusticorum 8) denounced the fact that the Hispanic country folk still worshipped trees and sacred stones (Simón 2005).The yew is often found in churchyards from England and Ireland to the Asturias (Simón ref); some of these trees are exceptionally large (over 3 m diameter) and likely to be over 3,000 years old, long predating the churches they are beside and betokening an earlier sacred site. Many believe that the enormous sacred evergreen at the pagan Temple at Uppsala was a yew. The Christian church commonly found it expedient to take over these existing sacred sites for churches. It is sometimes suggested that these were planted as a symbol of long life or trees of death. An explanation that the yews were planted to discourage farmers and drovers from letting their animals wander into the burial grounds, with the poisonous foliage being the disincentive, may be intentionally prosaic.
Yew is also associated with Wales because of the longbow, an early weapon of war, developed in Wales. Yew is the wood of choice for longbow making, which are constructed so the heartwood of yew is on the inside of the bow while the sapwood is on the outside. This takes advantage of the natural properties of yew wood since the heartwood is able to withstand compression while the sapwood is elastic and allows the bow to stretch. Both tend to return to their original straightness when the arrow is released.
Yews are widely used in landscaping and ornamental horticulture. Well over 200 cultivars of Taxus baccata have been named. The most popular of these are the "Irish Yew" (Taxus baccata 'Fastigiata'), a fastigiate cultivar of the European Yew selected from two trees found growing in Ireland, and the several cultivars with yellow leaves, collectively known as "Golden Yew". A special use of the yew is for topiary garden sculpture, a use not uncommon for many of the more elaborate gardens of England and Scotland.
The chemotherapy drug docetaxel is derived from Taxus baccata.
Literary References
John Keats refers to the yew in his "Ode on Melancholy", writing, "Make not your rosary of yew-berries, / Nor let the beetle, nor the death moth be / Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl / A partner in your sorrow's msteries..." (lines 5-8).References and External Links
- Conifer Specialist Group (1998). [Taxus baccata]. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 12 May 2006.
- Lewington, Anna, and Edward Parker. Ancient Trees: Trees that Live for a Thousand Years. London: Collins & Brown Ltd., 1999. ISBN 1855857049
- [(e-Keltoi) Francisco Marco Simón, "The Celts in the Iberian Peninsula"] 6: 287-345, 2005.
- [Druid Network: Yew]
- [Fortingall Yew]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.