The Bobart Yew

Oxford Botanic Garden is Britain's oldest botanic garden, founded in 1621 as a physic garden for teaching medicinal plants to university students. Jacob Bobart the Elder, a German-born gardener who became the garden's first curator, planted a yew in the Walled Garden in 1645, according to his own handwritten planting notes, one of a pair he set at the site. Herbalists of the time dismissed yew as having no medicinal use worth the space, but Bobart planted it anyway, alongside an avenue of others, and it has outlasted every argument about its usefulness by nearly four centuries. Only one of the original pair survives today. In February 2020, Storm Ciara tore off a large section of its upper canopy, scattering branches across the Walled Garden and leaving the tree looking badly maimed. The garden's own staff were unworried: yews regenerate from collapsed and layered branches in a way few other trees can, regrowing new stems from wood that would kill most species, and the tree was expected to recover fully rather than decline. It remains the oldest documented plant in the garden's entire collection, its exact planting year more precisely known than almost any other tree on this list, thanks to one meticulous 17th-century gardener's own notebook.