In fruit
A yew with a trunk 5.8 metres around normally comes with a documented history.
European Yew
Taxus baccata
No tree in Europe grows older than the yew, and no tree is harder to date: the trunk hollows out with age, taking its own tree rings with it, so the oldest yews keep their exact age a permanent secret. We map 63 of them, in 53 cities.
Estimates for the great churchyard yews of Britain and Ireland run from several centuries to several thousand years, and in many cases the tree is provably older than the medieval church beside it, because early Christians built next to yews that were already sacred. Every part of the tree except the red flesh of its berries is poisonous, which kept cattle away and longbows supplied. The yews mapped so far, castle gardens and churchyards included, are listed oldest first.
Porto
Munich
In fruit
Nobody can tell you how old a yew is, and that is a property of the species rather than a gap in the paperwork.
Alkmaar
In fruit
A 450-tonne crane picked this yew up and lifted it over the rooftops of Alkmaar.
Lisbon
In fruit
A European yew has no business growing here.
Milan
In fruit
The smallest tree on this square is the one to be careful about.
Berlin
In fruit
Berlin protected both of these yews for one stated reason: beauty.
In fruit
Of all the protected trees in this garden, the yew is the one with the longest future.
New York
In fruit
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.
London
In fruit
The oldest living thing in London stands in a churchyard most people drive straight past.
Photo: Philafrenzy (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Bath
In fruit
Ralph Allen made his fortune modernising Britain's postal system and quarrying the honey-coloured stone that built Georgian Bath, and in the 1730s he spent part of it building Prior Park, a landsca...
Rotterdam
In fruit
Rotterdam spent its first postwar years rebuilding rather than remembering, and it took one person to insist on a place to do both: Willem Ganter, first violinist of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orch...
Dublin
In fruit
Local tradition puts this yew at over seven hundred years old.
In fruit
A double row of yews in Ireland's national botanic garden may predate the garden itself by roughly sixty years.
Verona
In fruit
Behind the Giardino Giusti's formal cypress avenue and geometric flowerbeds, the garden turns considerably wilder: a wooded section built from yew and laurel, an evergreen understorey planted to fe...
Madrid
In fruit
Rather than one trunk, this yew splits into three, each thick enough to measure separately: 142, 120 and 140 centimetres around, fused into a single crown 18 metres wide standing beside the eastern...
Photo: Juan Cruzado Cortés (CC BY)
Vienna
In fruit
Nobody has measured this tree.
Glasgow
In fruit
Most of the ancient-looking yews scattered through Britain's churchyards got there because someone wanted shade over graves.
Florence
In fruit
Florence's oldest verified tree grows behind a ticket gate, in a garden older than the city's most famous museums by two centuries.
Photo: Ilaria Camprincoli (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Budapest
In fruit
Two old yews stand near the Franciscan ruins on Margaret Island, and only one of them still reads as a tree.
Edinburgh
In fruit
This yew grew a ring of its own trunks.
In fruit
Two yew trees have guarded the courtyard entrance to Craigmillar Castle since before anyone thought to write down when they were planted.
Photo: Jonathan Oldenbuck (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Naples
In fruit
In a garden assembled almost entirely from elsewhere, this is the one that was already European.
Warsaw
In fruit
Six stems rise from one base, and the thickest of them is not even two metres round: the register measured this yew stem by stem in 1975 and recorded 56, 51, 73, 43, 48 and 38 centimetres apiece, o...
Utrecht
In fruit
Every part of this tree is poisonous except the bright red flesh around its seed, which birds eat happily while leaving the seed itself, the one genuinely toxic part, to pass through unharmed and l...
Istanbul
In fruit
For a yew, three centuries is early middle age.
Nijmegen
In fruit
A charter of 1286 is the first mention of the little church this tree stands beside, and the churchyard around it has been in use ever since.
Salamanca
In fruit
Most of Salamanca's yews are new.
Belgrade
In fruit
Two yews flank the gate into Belgrade Cathedral's courtyard, one on each side of the entrance on Kneza Sime Markovića street, and between them they demonstrate something most visitors never think t...
Photo: BrankaVV, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In fruit
Zemun's Gradski park protects nine trees as a single natural monument, not one, an unusual designation that covers five European yews and four groups of Caucasian wingnut scattered through a park m...
Photo: Milica Buha (BuhaM), CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Cork
In fruit
In 2019 the Irish public voted this yew the country's Tree of the Year, and the next spring 11,372 Europeans backed it for the European title.
Photo: UtDicitur (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Oxford
In fruit
St Mary the Virgin in Iffley is one of the most complete unaltered Norman churches left in England, built around 1170 by the local lord of the manor and his wife.
In fruit
Oxford Botanic Garden is Britain's oldest botanic garden, founded in 1621 as a physic garden for teaching medicinal plants to university students.
Photo: Stephen Craven, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Zaragoza
In fruit
There is one yew in Zaragoza's register of singular trees, and this is it.
Dubrovnik
In fruit
Yews are Europe's slowest-aging trees by reputation, individual specimens in churchyards across the continent routinely claimed to be a thousand years old or more, sometimes credibly.
Haarlem
In fruit
Haarlem's oldest general cemetery is also one of the best places in the city to see what a 19th-century idea of a peaceful afterlife looked like in tree form.
Arnhem
In fruit
This yew was one of the first trees written into the Dutch register of monumental trees when it opened in 1983.
In fruit
A yew with a waist over three metres is a rare object in the Netherlands, which is the national register's own judgement and the reason this tree is on the list at all.
Ronda
In fruit
This is the one tree on this page whose age comes with its arithmetic attached.
Caserta
In fruit
This yew was already a grown tree when it was carried into the garden, which makes it older than the garden.
In fruit
A European yew in a flower bed on Piazza Vanvitelli is easy to miss next to its two showier square-mates, the monkey puzzle and the feathery casuarina a few steps away.
Assisi
In fruit
The 450 centimetres in this yew's register entry is not a trunk.
Photo: Jynjyn (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Craigends
In fruit
On the banks of the River Gryffe in Renfrewshire stands what looks like a small grove of yews and is in fact one tree.
Cremines
In fruit
Switzerland's oldest living tree has no path, no signpost and no bench, and the commune that owns it seems content to keep it that way.
Fortingall
In fruit
In 2015 a tree that had been male for as long as anyone had recorded it grew berries on a single branch.
Photo: Paul Hermans (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Gutau
In fruit
The name promises a thousand years.
Borrowdale
In fruit
William Wordsworth called them "those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, joined in one solemn and capacious grove," and for two centuries visitors have climbed the Cumbrian hillside above Seathwaite loo...
Brighton
In fruit
In a city known for its elms, the oldest tree is a yew, and there are two of them.
Estry
In fruit
The cavity inside this yew is about 3.1 metres across, and local accounts have thirty people standing in it at once.
Farnham
This yew grows out of the ruins of a medieval Cistercian abbey, and its roots arch above the ground before diving back in among the monks' old foundations.
Gumeli
In fruit
A Turkish forestry team put a number on this yew in 2016 that made headlines everywhere: 4,112 years old, they said, one of the five oldest living things on Earth and the only organism in Anatolia...
Hallstatt
In fruit
Austria protects trees for their rarity, their science or their size.
In fruit
You pass under this one on your way into the church.
In fruit
Upper Austria's natural monument register says, in its own words, that this yew is part of why Hallstatt looks like Hallstatt.
In fruit
A yew standing alone in an open meadow is an odd sight.
Henryków Lubański
In fruit
Poland's oldest living thing grows against the gable end of a farm outbuilding.
Photo: Oberlausitzerin64 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Jauze
The oldest tree in the Sarthe stands beside the church in Jauzé, a village most of France has never heard of.
Książ
In fruit
The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt put this yew at more than 800 years old, and nobody since has managed to confirm or disprove him.
Photo: Pnapora (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Llangernyw
In fruit
A spirit is said to speak from this tree once a year.
Photo: Stemonitis (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Lo
Julius Caesar is supposed to have tied his horse to this yew and slept in its shade on his way to conquer Britain in 55 BC.
Nedvedice
In fruit
Local belief holds that Pernstejn Castle prospers for as long as this yew does.
Nicorps
In fruit
In October 1987 a hurricane took roughly seven metres off the top of this yew.
Runnymede
In fruit
Two national bodies that both know their trees cannot agree on this one's age to within five hundred years.
Yvignac-la-Tour
In fruit
Fifty-eight people once stood inside this yew at the same time, a European record set in 2017.
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