Adam and Eve, the Speke Hall Yews

In 1712 the household at Speke Hall paid a man named Ezekiel Mason for making frames to set around the yew trees in the court. The yews are still there. Two of them fill the middle of the cobbled courtyard of this Tudor manor house on the southern edge of Liverpool, and they have names. Adam is the larger, a male tree measured at about 3.45 metres round in 2006. Eve, beside him, is female. How old they are is a genuine disagreement. The Ancient Yew Group, which recorded the pair, says Adam's girth suggests something like 300 years, while noting that ring counts on pruned branches have been cited for much more. Wikipedia puts them at 500 years at least. So the honest band runs from roughly 300 to 500, and the one firm date is 1712, when the trees were already worth protecting. They have had a famous visitor. Harriet Beecher Stowe came in 1853 and, in her travel book Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, mentioned a single yew. A painting by James Campbell from the following year, now in the Walker Art Gallery, shows two large trees standing in the court, so the pair was certainly there by then. The courtyard is inside the house grounds, which makes this a paid visit unless you are a National Trust member. The most recent record of the trees we can point to is the yew group's, so if you go, tell us how Adam and Eve are looking.