What is the oldest tree in Gutau?
Gutau's only mapped tree is a European yew known locally as the thousand-year yew, though nobody has actually dated it. It stands about twenty metres east of the Staudinger farmhouse at Lehen, on the edge of Gutau in Upper Austria, protected as a Naturdenkmal since 1985. The register carries no age field, and the trunk's own growth, 1.70 metres round in 1985 and 1.90 by 2016, argues against the popular name: a tree that size is unlikely to be anywhere near a thousand years old. It stands beside the Boblberg circuit, a marked local walking loop. Free, no permit, and no age we can vouch for.
The yew grows at the edge of Gutau, a small Upper Austrian village in the Bezirk Freistadt, about twenty metres east of the Staudinger farmhouse in the Lehen area. There is no public transport to the site; it is reached on foot, apparently as a stop on the Boblberg circuit, a local hiking loop that passes the farm. Protected as Naturdenkmal nd292 since 6 February 1985, the yew has been measured twice on record, 1.70 metres round in 1985 and 1.90 metres by 2016, with no age ever assigned by the register itself. The popular name, the thousand-year yew, is a local nickname rather than a documented figure, and given how slowly the trunk has grown, a full millennium looks unlikely. Nothing suggests the tree is anything but healthy and there is no fee or permit to see it. Only one yew Naturdenkmal is registered anywhere in the Gutau municipality, which is why this is almost certainly the tree shown in the photographs used to identify it: Upper Austria's Naturdenkmal programme protects individual trees for age, size or landscape value, one by one, rather than by species, and this yew has carried that protection for four decades.
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