Taxus baccata Seeds | English Yew

English yew hedge with dense dark needles and red arils on a female tree — English Yew (*Taxus baccata*): Taxaceae, woods and churchyards of Europe, North Africa and southwest Asia.

LATIN NAME: Taxus baccata

COMMON NAME: English Yew

Plant Profile

English yew is the dark evergreen of churchyards and formal gardens across Europe, a tree that can live for two thousand years and that has been clipped into hedges, arches and peacocks for at least as long as anyone has written about gardens. It grows ten to twenty metres in the open, with a short, fluted trunk, reddish-brown bark that scales off in flakes and a dense crown of flat, dark needles. The sexes are on different individuals, with cones of one kind per tree. The seed is a hard nut inside a bright red, cup-shaped aril that birds eat and spread. It tolerates deep shade, hard clipping, poor soil and city air, which is why it is still the default hedging conifer of northern Europe.

Science & Biotechnology

Taxus baccata is the source of 10-deacetylbaccatin III, the starting material for the semi-synthesis of docetaxel, and its needles can be harvested without killing the tree, which made it commercially important once the chemistry was worked out in the 1980s. Every part of the plant except the aril contains taxine B and related alkaloids that stop the heart, and the toxicity is real: horses die from a handful of clippings, and children have been poisoned by chewing the seeds. The aril is harmless and sugary, an adaptation that recruits birds as dispersers, since the seed passes through intact. The species is also remarkable for its longevity and for its ability to regenerate from layered branches, so a single tree can spread into a ring of clonal stems over centuries. Seed dormancy is deep and requires two winters.

Uses & Benefits

The wood is dense, elastic and finely grained, and it was the material of the English longbow, a use that shaped the management of yew woods for centuries. It is still used for carving, for inlay and for turned bowls. In the garden the tree is unmatched for topiary and for hedges in shade, where few other evergreens will grow, and the named forms with golden or columnar foliage are staples of the nursery trade. The arils feed thrushes and blackbirds in autumn. All clippings must be kept away from livestock, and the tree should not be planted where cattle or horses can reach it. It is also a slow plant to establish, so buy bare-root transplants rather than seed if a hedge is the goal.

Growing from Seed

Remove the aril by rubbing the seed in sand and water, then stratify: three months warm, three months cold, both in damp sand. Sow in late winter, one centimetre deep, in a loamy, free-draining mix, and expect germination over two springs. Seedlings are very slow and should stay in pots for two years. Alternatively take heel cuttings in autumn, which is faster and gives a named clone. Plant out in autumn or early spring, in sun or deep shade, into any soil that drains. Water for the first two summers, mulch with leaf mould, and clip hedges only from the third year, in late summer when the sap has stopped.

Our Take

The best evergreen for shade and shears, with a dark history and a lethal secret. Keep the clippings away from horses.

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