In October 1987 a hurricane took roughly seven metres off the top of this yew, and it has grown most of them back. People have measured it since 1930, which makes its record unusually good for a village tree: a trunk that has thickened from 6.28 to over 7 metres while the crown fell and recovered. It stands free in the churchyard of a village of a few hundred people, reckoned about 600 years old, alongside a missionary, a professor and the founder of an Argentine town.
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The Yew of Nicorps (If commun de Nicorps)
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · roughly 600 years · Nicorps, Manche
In October 1987 a hurricane took roughly seven metres off the top of this yew. It has grown most of them back.
The record is unusually good, because people keep measuring it. On 11 June 1930 the naturalist Henri Gadeau de Kerville taped the trunk at 6.28 metres and the crown at 18.50 for his survey of Normandy's old trees. When the CAUE de la Manche came back on 10 November 1998, the storm had cost the tree a major limb and the crown stood under 12 metres, while the trunk had thickened to 7.15. Aerial photographs from 1947 onwards show the canopy retreating on the north-east side. The crown is back to around 16 metres now, and the 1998 dossier describes the girth as still increasing, which makes 7.15 a floor rather than a figure.
Its age comes from the church's own account, which puts it at 600 years. A photographer once captioned a picture of it "l'if millénaire", and that thousand-year claim circulates with nothing behind it, so the six centuries are the number to work from and the millennium is village talk. Call it somewhere between 500 and 700.
This is a churchyard tree in a village of a few hundred people, and that is the honest scale of it. Buried in the same ground: a missionary, a professor of medicine, and Émile Daireaux, who founded a town in Argentina that still carries his name.
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