The Yew of Randenbroek

Most yews stop well short of twenty metres. This one, near the house at Randenbroek, has reached nineteen, and it has done it on two stems. The national register of monumental trees measures it at 3.34 metres round and bands its planting to the 1860s, which makes it about 160 years old. By the standards of its species that is young. Yews are the long-lived trees of European churchyards and gardens, and a yew of 160 is only getting started. The reason to come and look is its height and its shape, not its age. Yew is everywhere else in this park, kept low. The city's management plan for Randenbroek counts about 700 metres of yew hedge, clipped to 80 centimetres, around the old kitchen garden and the house, and keeps yew, holly and rhododendron as the undergrowth of the wooded part of the park. This is the one that was allowed to grow into a tree. The estate it stands on goes back to a farm on marshy ground, owned by the bishops of Utrecht in the fourteenth century and turned into a country house with gardens by the architect Jacob van Campen after 1626. The landscape park around it dates from the years after 1814.