The Yew of Schönbrunn's Botanical Garden

Nobody has measured this tree. There is no girth on file, no height, no age and no photograph in the usual archives. What exists is a line in Vienna's register of natural monuments, number 181, protected on 4 September 1941, and a printed survey from 1949 that lists it again with nothing written beside it. That blank is the point. The same 1949 survey marks the tree that stood about thirty metres away, a Japanese pagoda tree carrying number 179, as destroyed by war events. This yew and the oak twelve metres from it carry no such note, which is the nearest thing to a wartime health certificate a tree can hold. Yews reward exactly this kind of neglect. Taxus baccata grows slowly, tolerates deep shade and hard cutting, and can carry on for centuries without ever getting spectacular enough to attract a tape measure, which is roughly how a protected tree spends eighty-five years on a government list without acquiring a single number. So this one comes with an honest hole in it. It stands in the corner of Schönbrunn's botanical garden near the Hietzinger Tor, it has been there since before the bombing, and it looks the same in February as it does in July, which is what a yew is for. The garden itself is free and open daily. If you get a tape around it, tell us what it says.