More on the wonderful Portbury Yew

On 12th Feb this year I ran a blog about the Ancient Yew Group (see it here - scroll down) - it inspired me to look out the Portbury Yew when I was last on my way to visit family. I'd intended to add a follow-up blog with these photos of the yew in the church yard of St Mary the Virgin, just outside Bristol, but a problem with the digital camera meant only last week was I able to extract the photos.....it really is a wonderful wonderful tree....

Let me remind you - in the last blog I quoted from the Daily Telegraph on Saturday 29th December 2007 and an article entitled "Raiders of the lost bark:the last crusade."

I quote James Douglas again: "The truth is that a yew is the oldest living organism any of us is ever likely to see. To illustrate the point, we drop in on the Portbury Yew, in the village churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, just outside Bristol. A man painting the lychgate confides his fears that the old tree “won’t last much longer, because it is completely hollowed out”. But while the inner heartwood may indeed have rotted so thoroughly as to leave a damp, cavern-like inner chamber, it is actually very much alive and thriving. The canopy above is broad, thick and soaring. The knotted and gnarled bark, beneath its dry flakes, has beautiful flat, flowing, multi-coloured strips from shades of orange to grey. If Paul Gauguin ever turned his idiosyncratic art to painting a tree trunk, it would surely have looked something like this.

But most remarkable of all, about 10 feet up within the “cavern”, two fat, trunk-like shoots have burst out from the inner bark and, over countless decades, reached down to implant themselves in the soil. “As the remainder of the outer trunk rots away, these internal roots will grow up as trees themselves within the shell,” explains Hills. “Sometimes, with yews, we cannot be sure whether we are looking at the original tree, or one that started life within a decaying, older stem.”

All this makes the species the subject of endless conjecture about age. The oldest tree in Europe is said to be the Fortingall Yew in Scotland, considered between 3,000 and 5,000 years old. The Portbury Yew has a notice saying it is “thought to be” 2,000 years old. Tim, who is regularly called upon to pronounce on the subject, refuses to speculate. “Since its heartwood decays, it becomes impossible to give an accurate figure. All I usually say is that, with a girth of l6ft, you are probably looking at 500 years, and 700 to 1,000 years or more at 20ft.”

One interesting factor I came across while seeking further info - is that the church at Portbury has a most interesting boiler according to this website here!

Other facts came from this website here - like the Vikings used Yew nails for their longboats, an extract of the yew is used in cancer treatments, yew is great to make longbows - indeed the demand for such weaponry in the Middle Ages led to a decline in the species..... there has been much heated discussion as to why the Yew is so often found in churchyards - some say it is the deep-dark green, almost eerie and shady presence of the tree. Other say because it is the tree of death, due to its poisonous chemistry, or that it was put in churchyards, where it would not be accessible to life-stock to grow wood for the longbows. Christian scholars have associated it with Christ as 'the tree of the cross' or with the theme of resurrection. However, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Yew was the archetype of "The Tree of Life" to people all over Europe eons before Christ was born...

Anyway enough of all this - too late now and work tomorrow...