The Yew of Hero Park

This yew is one of 144 evergreens planted in 1920 around a glacial boulder called Sugar Loaf Rock, each tree standing as a living memorial to a Staten Island resident killed in the First World War. A plaque at the boulder names every soldier the grove commemorates, making Hero Park one of the more literal war memorials in New York City: not statues or a wall of names alone, but a planted forest where each individual tree corresponds to an individual death, a practice with a documented precedent in similar WWI memorial tree plantings elsewhere in the country around the same period. European yews are exceptionally long lived and slow growing, a species choice that all but guaranteed this planting would still be standing a century later, evergreen through every winter since 1920 the way the soldiers it honors never got to see. At just over a century old it is younger than most other trees on this list, but its age is not really the point; the grove was planted to hold a specific memory in place, and a century on, it still does.