The practice of planting yews in churchyards helps to account for the extravagant statements about the age of certain trees. Generation after generation has become familiar with seeing a yew beside the parish church; the date of the building of the church being accurately known, it comes to be assumed that church and tree are coeval. Dr. Lowe gives a case in point of two churches in contiguous parishes in Kent, each of which has a large yew in the churchyard reckoned to be the same age as the church. One of these yews measures 16 feet in girth, the other 17 feet; but as one of the churches dates back to the eleventh century, and the other only to the fourteenth, the tradition about the trees would have one yew to be three hundred years older than the other, although only differing in girth by one foot.[24]
The poisonous properties of the yew are pretty generally known; in fact, Pliny says that the adjective toxicus, poisonous, was once written taxicus from taxus, the yew. But in the English Encyclopædia is the mischievous statement—"It is now well known that the fruit of the yew may be eaten with impunity." It is quite true that the pulp surrounding the seed, with its sweet but sickly taste, does not possess the poisonous properties of the foliage and young bark; but the seed itself is deadly, numerous fatal cases having been recorded as the result of swallowing it. On the whole, therefore, it is best to give children nice chocolates on condition that they leave the pretty yew berries alone.
A yew bearing yellow berries originated at Glasnevin about 100 years ago and has been pretty extensively propagated in Ireland, but I have never happened to see it in fruit, though I have a clear recollection of the weird yew avenue at Glasnevin.
The Irish or Florence Court yew, described above, found high favour with garden designers seventy or eighty years ago, owing to its fastigiate habit; but, at best, it is a funereal object, and a more cheerful effect may be obtained by planting Incense Cedar (Libocedrus decurrens), Lawson Cypress or Pencil Cedar (Juniperus virginiana).
Dr. Prior, in his excellent work on the Popular Names of British Plants (1879), argued confidently that the names "yew" and "ivy" were but different forms of the same word; but the late Professor Skeat declined to admit that there was any connection between them. It is an elusive element in English place-names; Yeovil in Somerset being assigned to a totally different origin. Yeoford, in Devon, has been variously written Uford and Yewford, and may possibly be named from a yew tree, and so may Uffculme in the same county. The Gaelic iubhar (pronounced "yure") is more easily recognised in the suffix -ure or -nure to many Irish and Scottish place-names. For instance, Gortinure, near Londonderry, is written Gort-an-iubhair in the Annals of the Four Masters; Glenure in Argyll and Palnure in Galloway are respectively the glen and stream (pol) of the yews. The word is more closely disguised in Newry, County Down; but that name is explained in the aforesaid Annals as derived from a yew planted by St. Patrick himself, whence the monastery founded there was called Iubhar-cinn-trachta, the yew near high tide-mark. The name was shortened into an-Iubharach, whence the transition was easy to Newry. In Galloway, Palnure is the stream of the yews, and in Ayrshire Dunure is the fort of the yew-tree.
The Cypress and its Kin
Among all the green things that clothe this wonderful globe—that globe which man strives so desperately to unclothe that he may pile upon it leagues of bricks and mortar, defile it with the smoke of myriad furnaces, burrow in it in pursuit of pelf to pay for still more bricks, mortar and furnaces—among these green things, I say, no group bears the badge of clanship more openly than the Cypresses (Cupressineæ), a branch of the great order of Conifers. It contains but a single species indigenous to the British Isles, namely, the common juniper (Juniperus communis), which cannot aspire to rank among forest trees. Agriculture and mineral industry have extirpated it in many districts where it once abounded; but it is still a characteristic feature in the landscape on some of the English chalk downs, in East Anglia, the Scottish Highlands, western Ireland, and other places where it has been allowed to survive. Near Capenoch, in Dumfriesshire, there remains a broad hillside thickly covered with juniper, which seems to have been the chief growth there from immemorial time.
