The Yew of the TU Schaugärten

Of all the protected trees in this garden, the yew is the one with the longest future. Taxus baccata is the slowest and longest-lived tree in northern Europe, unremarkable at five hundred years, an age at which an oak already counts as ancient and a birch has been gone for centuries. This one stands in the front garden of the old Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian gardeners' school that held this Dahlem block from 1903 to 1966 and taught planting by planting. Berlin listed the yew as natural monument 6-76/B-1 on 2 March 1993 and the western red cedar a few paces away as 6-76/B-2, on the same day, under the same ordinance. The paperwork treats them as a pair and so does the ground. Yews hand a visitor almost nothing. Dark, dense, fluted at the base rather than round, with bark that peels in red-brown strips, and effectively impossible to date from outside, because the heartwood rots away while the tree carries on growing perfectly well. That is why Britain's yew estimates swing by a thousand years and why nobody has offered a number for this one. Berlin records no age and no girth here. If you have measured it, we would like the figure.