The Great Yew of Mount Royal Cemetery

A Japanese yew in this climate normally manages five or six metres. This one is fifteen. It stands on its own on a gentle slope in Mount Royal Cemetery, in a stretch where the gravestones are thinly scattered, which is what makes it findable and also what makes it worth the walk: a yew given room to become a tree instead of a hedge. The city's survey calls it the largest of its species on the mountain, at 50 centimetres across the trunk, which for a yew is a great deal of wood. Some specialists think it is not one plant at all. The bark is oddly reddish and the crown unusually round and compact, and the theory on the record is that a male and a female were grafted together and grew on as a single tree. Nobody has taken it apart to find out. Its age is given as over sixty years, which makes it the youngest tree on this page and does nothing to explain the height. One caution about the address, because two cemeteries adjoin on this flank of the mountain and there is a Japanese yew recorded in the other one as well. This is the Mount Royal Cemetery tree, not the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges one. Enter from the chemin de la Foret side. The city's heritage page for it is the only published description that exists.