Iodh or Yew

The Dark One
A dense evergreen tree, of no great height, yew often has one or more massive trunks of very hard wood, with dark, reddish bark and dark green, needle-like leaves. The scarlet berries (arils) stand out easily in the autumn. Unlike pine, yew bark contains no resin and, apart from the arils, all parts of the tree are highly poisonous.

An Immortal
The remarkable thing about the yew is that it is almost immortal and can sprout again, even after losing all its branches. Whilst there are many trees that can produce new shoots (hazel), or survive storm-damage (willow), or root from suckers (poplars), none have the third way of reproducing themselves, as yew does, through the layering process - a highly unusual method in trees.

Making new feet
Layering happens when a branch that touches the ground can make roots from the point of contact. In time, if these roots grow sufficiently strong, then a new tree is formed, independent of the original ‘mother’. Sometimes however, they may never become entirely independent, but rather continue the growing process by surrounding the initial mother tree with further trees.

Protective nursery
However, yew has yet a further surpise because, as old wood within the trunk begins to rot naturally, a protective skin of new growth may start from inside it, shielding the new growth and allowing the yew to resurrect itself from the outside in. If the growth of the cambium (or growing) layer keeps up with the rate of decay, the result is that a yew that appears to be a hollow, decayed wreck is in reality simply self-regenerating. There is no biological reason for a yew tree to die.

Bows and arrows
Together with boxwood, the wood of yew is the hardest of any tree in temperate zones, and very enduring. It has been highly prized for centuries. A yew spear found in Clacton, Essex, dates from about 150,000 years ago and is the world’s oldest man-made artifact. A hill walker in in the peat bogs of Carrifran Wildwood discovered a bow of 6,000 years old, and the 5,300 year old Iceman discovered on the Italian-Austrian border, had a yew bow measuring six feet although he himself was only 5’2” tall.

History’s tale of war
The reason yew is now found mainly in churchyards is largely because of war. In 1369 Edward III made a law that every able-bodied man must be practiced in archery and so natural yew forests began to vanish. By 1492 England had to import yew wood, and a law decreed that every trading ship unloading in an English harbour be taxed four yew bows per ton of freight. Nearly a million bows came to England within the next half century from the continent and no yew trees were left in Bavaria by 1568.

Marking the dead
Yews have been associated with sacred centres for thousands of years. The Fortingall yew (Perthshire), at over 5,000 years old and possibly the oldest living tree in the world, sits on the northern side of Carn nam Marbh (Mound of the Dead), an ancient Bronze Age tumulus. The builders of Stonehenge, Avebury, Calanais and Newgrange, all planted yews on the north side of their burial mounds.

Seeing Stonehenge built
It is an astonishing fact that the yew tree at Discoed in Wales was possibly already about five hundred years old when the first bluestones from the Prescelli mountains passed it on their way to be made into Stonehenge - and that same tree is still alive! Ireland really means ‘Yew Island’, (the Greeks and Romans calling it Ierne and Iubernia respectively), and Iona is similarly another island whose root is yew (I, ee, y, all being forms of the same word).

Within its death is resurrection
Represented by the thirteenth rune, eiwaz, which is generally understood to represent death and rebirth, this yew rune is in the shape of a zigzag, which most likely symbolises the spiral. Another later rune for Yew, yr, represents the roots of the Tree of Life. Glastonbury - or glas tann bury - translates as (ever)‘green sacred tree’, and in Wales it is referred to as ‘the gentle guardian of the dead’