Cephalotaxus sinensis Seeds | Chinese Plum Yew
LATIN NAME: Cephalotaxus sinensis
COMMON NAME: Chinese Plum Yew
Plant Profile
Cephalotaxine itself has no useful activity. What matters is the ester side chain that the plant attaches to it, and the harringtonines differ from one another in the shape of that chain, which is why several closely related compounds appear in the same extract. The alkaloids are also not the taxane chemistry that made the true yews famous: the two genera sit in the same family but build entirely different molecules, and a screen for one will not find the other.
Unlike a yew, this species rarely makes a single clean trunk. It builds a framework of several stems from the base, each arching outward, and it will keep resprouting from the base if a stem is cut, so an old plant is broader than it is tall. The foliage is arranged in two ranks on the shoot and forms a soft V above the branch, and each leaf ends in a gentle point rather than the hard spine of a nutmeg yew.
Turn a leaf over and the identification is settled: two wide bands of pale stomata run the length of the underside, separated by the raised midrib, while the upper surface is a uniform dark green. Those bands let the plant work at low light intensities under a canopy, and they are why the foliage looks frosted from below.
Plum yews are dioecious, so a plant is either male or female, and the males carry their pollen cones in small rounded heads in the leaf axils. A female plant bears a few ovules at the tip of the previous season’s growth and fills a single seed in each, wrapped in a fleshy aril that ripens from green to a dull purple-brown.
This is the conifer to plant where nothing else will grow. It takes full shade under established trees, tolerates the dry soil beneath them better than most evergreens, and keeps its colour through the coldest weather, which makes it useful as a structural shrub at the corner of a house or as an informal low hedge. It shears well and regrows from old wood, so it can be kept to a metre or allowed to spread to three. Deer browse it less than they browse yew, which has made it a standard substitute in gardens where yew would be stripped, and its tolerance of coastal wind gives it a place in a seaside planting.
Science & Biotechnology
Collecting the raw material from wild plum yews is slow work on a plant that grows slowly anyway, so researchers have looked at two alternatives. The first is cell and tissue culture: callus and cell suspension cultures of Cephalotaxus have been grown to see whether cephalotaxine can be produced in a flask rather than a forest, with mixed results that depend heavily on the line and the medium. The second is propagation, where shoot cultures and semi-ripe cuttings are used to build numbers of selected plants instead of relying on seed.
A home grower can take semi-ripe cuttings in late summer, wound the base, dip it in rooting powder and keep it in a closed frame through the winter; only a proportion will root, so take more than you need. Seed is a slower route and needs a moist cool period, and the seedlings are uneven in habit, which is why named forms are almost always sold as cuttings.
Uses & Benefits
An inconspicuous evergreen of Chinese woodland holds one of the few plant alkaloids to have reached the clinic as a leukaemia drug. The needles and bark of plum yews contain cephalotaxine, and, more importantly, a family of esters built on it, the harringtonines, of which one was developed into an anticancer medicine for chronic myeloid leukaemia. Chinese clinical work on the harringtonines in the 1970s was among the earliest demonstrations that this group of alkaloids could be used in patients, and the genus has been studied for them ever since. The Chinese plum yew is one of the most productive species to screen.
Growing from Seed
Sow the cleaned seed in autumn in a deep pot of loam-based compost mixed with an equal part of coarse sand and a little leaf mould, covering it with about twenty millimetres of the mix. Leave the pot in a shaded frame through the winter so that the seed takes up water in cool conditions, and keep it moist through the following summer without letting it stand in water; seed that stays silent for a whole season may still sprout in the next. Pot the seedlings on individually as soon as they have made four or five true leaves, and grow them in shade for their first two seasons.
Space garden plants about a metre and a half apart for a hedge and twice that for specimens. Water new plants through their first two summers, then allow the soil to dry between waterings, since this species resents wet feet. Feed once in spring with a slow-release fertiliser and avoid high-nitrogen feeds, which make the new shoots soft and prone to dieback. Shear in late spring after the new growth has hardened, never in autumn, and cut back to old wood only when a plant has outgrown its place, because recovery is slow. Scale insects can build up on the leaf undersides in still air, and a sooty mould on the foliage is usually the first sign of them; watch also for the root problems that follow heavy, waterlogged soil.
Our Take
Plant it for structure and for shade, and put it where the dark foliage can be seen against something pale. The other plum yews are worth comparing in the same border, particularly Cephalotaxus oliveri and the larger-growing Cephalotaxus fortunei, which are handled the same way and will carry a shaded corner through a hard winter. Where the soil is drier still, the Chinese hemlock, Tsuga chinensis, makes a graceful companion that shares the same woodland origins.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Chinese Plum Yew: