A European yew has no business growing here.
European Yew
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, 61 so far across 51 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.
Lisbon
Milan
The smallest tree on this square is the one to be careful about.
Florence
Photo: Ilaria Camprincoli (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Florence's oldest verified tree grows behind a ticket gate, in a garden older than the city's most famous museums by two centuries.
Arnhem
This yew was one of the first trees written into the Dutch register of monumental trees when it opened in 1983.
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.
Berlin
Berlin protected both of these yews for one stated reason: beauty.
Of all the protected trees in this garden, the yew is the one with the longest future.
Vienna
Nobody has measured this tree.
London
Photo: Philafrenzy (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The oldest living thing in London stands in a churchyard most people drive straight past.
New York
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.
Dublin
Local tradition puts this yew at over seven hundred years old.
A double row of yews in Ireland's national botanic garden may predate the garden itself by roughly sixty years.
Utrecht
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...
Porto
A yew with a trunk 5.8 metres around normally comes with a documented history.
Haarlem
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.
Cork
Photo: UtDicitur (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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.
Munich
Nobody can tell you how old a yew is, and that is a property of the species rather than a gap in the paperwork.
Nijmegen
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.
Bath
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...
Edinburgh
This yew grew a ring of its own trunks.
Photo: Jonathan Oldenbuck (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Two yew trees have guarded the courtyard entrance to Craigmillar Castle since before anyone thought to write down when they were planted.
Madrid
Photo: Juan Cruzado Cortés (CC BY)
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...
Glasgow
Most of the ancient-looking yews scattered through Britain's churchyards got there because someone wanted shade over graves.
Caserta
This yew was already a grown tree when it was carried into the garden, which makes it older than the garden.
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.
Budapest
Two old yews stand near the Franciscan ruins on Margaret Island, and only one of them still reads as a tree.
Warsaw
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...
Istanbul
For a yew, three centuries is early middle age.
Verona
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...
Alkmaar
A 450-tonne crane picked this yew up and lifted it over the rooftops of Alkmaar.
Naples
In a garden assembled almost entirely from elsewhere, this is the one that was already European.
Belgrade
Photo: BrankaVV, CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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: Milica Buha (BuhaM), CC BY-SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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...
Dubrovnik
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.
Oxford
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.
Photo: Stephen Craven, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Oxford Botanic Garden is Britain's oldest botanic garden, founded in 1621 as a physic garden for teaching medicinal plants to university students.
Rotterdam
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...
Salamanca
Most of Salamanca's yews are new.
Zaragoza
There is one yew in Zaragoza's register of singular trees, and this is it.
Ronda
This is the one tree on this page whose age comes with its arithmetic attached.
Assisi
Photo: Jynjyn (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The 450 centimetres in this yew's register entry is not a trunk.
Craigends
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
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
Photo: Paul Hermans (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In 2015 a tree that had been male for as long as anyone had recorded it grew berries on a single branch.
Gutau
The name promises a thousand years.
Borrowdale
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 a city known for its elms, the oldest tree is a yew, and there are two of them.
Estry
The cavity inside this yew is about 3.1 metres across, and local accounts have thirty people standing in it at once.
Gumeli
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
Austria protects trees for their rarity, their science or their size.
You pass under this one on your way into the church.
Upper Austria's natural monument register says, in its own words, that this yew is part of why Hallstatt looks like Hallstatt.
A yew standing alone in an open meadow is an odd sight.
Henryków Lubański
Photo: Oberlausitzerin64 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Poland's oldest living thing grows against the gable end of a farm outbuilding.
Jauze
The oldest tree in the Sarthe stands beside the church in Jauzé, a village most of France has never heard of.
Książ
Photo: Pnapora (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt put this yew at more than 800 years old, and nobody since has managed to confirm or disprove him.
Llangernyw
Photo: Stemonitis (CC BY-SA 2.5)
A spirit is said to speak from this tree once a year.
Nedvedice
Local belief holds that Pernstejn Castle prospers for as long as this yew does.
Nicorps
In October 1987 a hurricane took roughly seven metres off the top of this yew.
Runnymede
Two national bodies that both know their trees cannot agree on this one's age to within five hundred years.
Yvignac-la-Tour
Fifty-eight people once stood inside this yew at the same time, a European record set in 2017.
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