The Yew of the Garden of the Princes

In a garden assembled almost entirely from elsewhere, this is the one that was already European. Nearly everything around it came by ship: camphor from China, a cypress from Mexico, eucalyptus and paperbark from Australia. Taxus baccata grows wild from Ireland to Iran and needed no importing, and the park's curators single it out for exactly that, one of the few native species kept in a collection built to show off the foreign. It is not big. Ten metres tall, two and a half metres round, which for a yew means very little, because the species hollows itself out as it ages and stops keeping a legible record of its own years. What it has instead is shape. The trunk twists, and the roots come up out of the soil and loop across it, so the tree reads as carved rather than grown. One correction, because it is a trap worth naming. Some accounts date this yew to 1753. That is not a record of the tree. It is the year Linnaeus published Species Plantarum, and it sits after the species name in every proper citation of it. Nobody has dated this yew, and the honest answer is that it is old and undated.