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. This page maps every european yew on the site, 17 so far across 14 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.
Totteridge, North London. The oldest living thing in London stands in a churchyard most people drive straight past.
Retiro. 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 wall of the Palacio de Velazquez, a red-brick exhibition hall built in 1883.
Grymes Hill, Staten Island. 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.
Newcastle-Lyons, West Dublin. Local tradition puts this yew at over seven hundred years old.
Glasnevin. A double row of yews in Ireland's national botanic garden may predate the garden itself by roughly sixty years.
Craigmillar. Two yew trees have guarded the courtyard entrance to Craigmillar Castle since before anyone thought to write down when they were planted.
San Marco. Florence's oldest verified tree grows behind a ticket gate, in a garden older than the city's most famous museums by two centuries.
Capodimonte. Almost everything else remarkable at Capodimonte arrived from somewhere else, shipped in by Bourbon collectors chasing the latest botanical fashion from China, Mexico or Australia.
Veronetta. 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 feel more like a natural grove than a designed landscape, leading down to a sixteenth-century grotto styled after the artificial caves fashionable in Renaissance Italian gardens.
Widcombe. 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 landscape garden on the hillside above the city designed with advice from the poet Alexander Pope and, later, Capability Brown.
Iffley. 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.
City centre, opposite Christ Church Meadow. Oxford Botanic Garden is Britain's oldest botanic garden, founded in 1621 as a physic garden for teaching medicinal plants to university students.
King's Park. Most of the ancient-looking yews scattered through Britain's churchyards got there because someone wanted shade over graves.
Blarney. 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.
Trsteno. 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.
Stari Grad. 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 to check: yews come in two sexes, and these are one of each.
Zemun. 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 most Belgraders think of simply as Zemun's green center.
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