The Island's Oldest Yew

Two old yews stand near the Franciscan ruins on Margaret Island, and only one of them still reads as a tree. This is the larger. The other was cut back radically decades ago for reasons nobody wrote down, and now sits at 4.5 metres tall under a crown 7 to 8 metres wide, so anyone comparing the two is not looking at damage from the same event but at one tree that was left alone and one that was not. FŐKERT's 2020 survey of the island calls this the largest and oldest yew there, with nothing comparable anywhere else on the island, and dates it to around 203 years at the time, so roughly 209 now. A former head gardener put it in the 1800s independently. A 1967 survey recorded four old shrub-form yews on the island, two of them standing on their own by the Franciscan ruins; this is one of that pair. For a yew, 209 years is nothing. The species runs to millennia, and English churchyards hold specimens ten times this age, which makes the island's oldest yew a young tree with old damage: rot at the root collar and trunk, bark loss, a major limb long gone leaving the crown truncated, lower branches clipped since a 2012 tidy-up. The most recent assessment is 2020. The black walnut is a hundred metres away.