The Topkapı Palace Yew

For a yew, three centuries is early middle age. This one, in the Fourth Courtyard of Topkapı Palace, is registered at 314 years, 13 metres tall with a trunk 103 centimetres across and a crown 12 metres wide, which by the standards of a species that can run to millennia makes it a young adult with a long career ahead. The government record has quirks worth naming. Two views of the same database give the age as 314 and 310, a four-year drift, and one of them files the tree under a district hundreds of kilometres away in Ankara province while its own description talks about Topkapı, which is a clerical slip rather than a doubt about where the tree is. Separately, an independent field survey measured three yews in this courtyard, two of them 3.26 and 3.09 metres around, and photographed them in December 2014. That is the freshest direct evidence of them standing that this entry rests on, and it is now twelve years old. Unlike the other trees on this list, it costs money. The Fourth Courtyard was the sultan's private terrace garden, above the Golden Horn beside the Baghdad Kiosk that Murad IV built in 1639, and reaching it needs a Topkapı Palace museum ticket. The free trees of Gülhane Park are 550 metres downhill.