The Totteridge Yew

The oldest living thing in London stands in a churchyard most people drive straight past. This yew was already ancient when the Romans built Londinium two thousand years ago, and the church beside it is the newcomer: St Andrew's dates only to the 13th century, a good thousand years younger than the tree growing at its edge. A 2008 survey by the Conservation Foundation, the Ancient Yew Group and Barnet Council named it possibly the oldest tree in the city, though ring counting is useless here. Yew heartwood rots away long before it can be counted, which is why the estimate spans a thousand years, 1,000 to 2,000, rather than a single number. What survives is a hollow, propped trunk with a girth of nearly eight metres, kept alive the way most ancient yews are kept alive: repeated pollarding, cutting the tree back hard and often enough to reset its own clock rather than let it grow toward collapse. Totteridge was a village long before London reached it, and its Hundred Court, the local medieval assembly that settled disputes and collected dues, once met in the yew's shade, using the tree as a landmark centuries before anyone thought to measure its age.