A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
yew
The yew is a dark evergreen conifer with flat needles, red fleshy fruit, and the ability to live for an extraordinarily long time. It regenerates by dropping branches that root where they touch and by growing new stems inside the hollow shell of the old trunk, so an ancient yew is less an individual than a continuing process. Every part except the red flesh is poisonous.
Etymology
The word is Old English with relatives across the Germanic and Celtic languages, and it is one of the oldest tree names in Europe. The rune for the yew appears in the earliest futhark, a runic alphabet, and the tree gives its name to places across the continent, including the Irish county of Mayo and the Swiss city of Yverdon.
Notes
The English longbow was made of yew, cut so that the stave included both the springy sapwood and the compression-resistant heartwood, which makes the bow a natural laminate. Demand was so great that English yew ran out and staves were imported by statute from the continent with every shipment of wine.