The Oude Hortus Yew

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 land somewhere new. That single evolutionary trick is most of why yews are found planted beside old churches and gardens across Europe: birds do the planting, humans get the credit. This yew has stood in Utrecht University's old botanical garden for at least 150 years, part of a teaching collection that once used its poisonous foliage as a live lesson in medicinal and dangerous plants rather than as a specimen prized for size or age alone. Yews grow slowly and live long by almost any measure, routinely reaching centuries in places nobody has disturbed them, and this one has had a walled, tended garden to itself for its entire recorded life, none of the storm damage or development pressure that shortens most urban trees' lives. It stands quietly among the ginkgo and rarer imports from China, easy to walk past without a second look, though it has technically been capable of killing anyone who ate the wrong part of it since long before any visitor reading this was born.