The Twin Yews of Johannaplatz

Berlin protected both of these yews for one stated reason: beauty. They hold separate entries in the register, 4-30/B at the south end of the square and 4-31/B at the north, both Taxus baccata, both signed off on the same day in March 1993, and the ground given for each is Schoenheit. Nothing about size, nothing about age. The square under them was laid out in 1890 for a church that never got built. Six streets of the Grunewald villa colony run into it, and the hexagon left in the middle went to the gardeners rather than the architects. In 1896 the royal garden inspector Hermann Roehr redesigned it as a garden square, with groups of broadleaves and conifers set around semicircular seating, and in 1898 it was named after Johanna von Bismarck, the chancellor's wife. The borough writes that the old tree stock here has been largely preserved to this day. The two yews stand at opposite ends of that hexagon, roughly sixty metres apart, which makes them one stop rather than two. Yews give little away. Dark, dense and slow, they are the species most often underestimated by people who judge a tree by its waistline. Neither of these has ever been dated, and the Berlin register records no girth for either. If you have put a tape round one of them, tell us.