The Yew of Palacete Burmester

A yew with a trunk 5.8 metres around normally comes with a documented history. This one has none. Portugal's forest register took the measurement in 2020, classified the tree, and left the age column empty; the city council's announcement lists the yew among four protected specimens in the garden of the Palacete Burmester and gives no date either. That gap is better left open than filled in. Taxus baccata thickens slowly enough that trees of this girth elsewhere in Europe are routinely dated in the several hundreds of years, so it is reasonable to think this one is old. It is not honest to print a number. Yews also make their own dating difficult by hollowing at the centre as they age, taking with them exactly the rings anyone would want to count. What can be said plainly is this: the tree stands in a small garden on the Faculty of Sciences campus of the University of Porto, beside the Casa dos Livros and a few hundred metres from the Jardim Botânico do Porto, and the species is scarce in Portugal outside the northern mountains, which makes a specimen this size in a city garden unusual. Every part of it is poisonous except the red flesh around the seed. It is evergreen, so February looks much like August, which at least settles the question of when to come.