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Hi it's the twenty-second of September and today we're looking at Yew trees.
Ok, well as you can see, I'm in a graveyard at the moment and there's an old Yew tree
here. Um you'll often find them in graveyards, because churches are often built on old religious
sites and...well you can see by this tree and there's the church there, this tree is
clearly much older than the church and was obviouslyhere before and er...it's also hollow
and this particular tree, you're supposed to be cursed ifd you go inside it, but let's
give it a go anyway. And yeah, you can see it's pretty dark in here. But quite, quite
fascinating. And er..also down here, I don't know if you
can see, there's some Chicken Of The woods that's really quite manky and mouldy but,
often to be found growing on Yew trees. Chicken Of The Woods is one of the main fungi
responsible for heart-wood rot in Yew trees. And er, Yew trees do have this...this habit
of producing these kind of secondary trunks on the outside and then hollowing out in the
middle, which makes them notoriously difficult to age.
The growth rate of Yew trees slows as they age, as well as them being prone to periods
of dormancy in which little or no growth occurs. It has been estimated that for the first three-hundred
years of it's life, a Yew tree adds about an inch of trunk girth, every five years.
After this, growth becomes more errratic. Different areas of the tree may become dormant
and it is this that causes the apparent divisions in the trunks. There are certainly Yew trees
that are over two-thousand years old and some have been estimated to be over five-thousand
years old, making them contenders for the oldest living things on Earth.
Now um...most parts of a Yew tree are poisonous. Um...the foliage is particularly poisonous
to livestock, especially cattle and um...yeah, when it dries, it becomes even more toxic
to them, so um...cattle have died from eating Yew foliage.
Now the edible part of a Yew tree is the berries, but um...only the er..red fleshy part of the
berries. The seeds are um...poisonous, like the rest of the tree is.
So when eating the berries, probably the safest thing to do is try and extract the seed before
you put it in your mouth, but um.. as you can see, they are really slimy and um...it's
actually quite difficult to do this. So really the easiest way, is to put the berry
in your mouth and um... And spit out the pip.
And er...when eating these, it is quite important that you make sure you don't swallow the pip.
Um...I've heard stories that three of theese are enough to stop your heart and someone
ate one with a cracked tooth and cut the seed and made themselves really ill, but um...
I don't think they're that toxic, uh...the only evidence I've heard of anyone actually
dying from eating Yew, is children eating the foliage. But, um...yeah, it's best not
to take any chances. Bear in mind that all parts of the Yew tree,
except the flesh of the berries, are fatally poisonous - the wood, the bark, the leaves
and the seeds. They also can produce an allergic reaction,
which may be a problem for some people who are doing things like making long bows from
the Yew wood. And one thing with Yew berries is they are
really, really sweet. You'll be quite surprised how sweet they actually are. They don't have
much flavour, but they are very sugary. A real sucrose kind of sugar...
Now yew berries, they don't intend to kill us by advertising themselves to be eaten like
this, but mormally they're eaten by things like birds and foxes, of which they pass straight
through the digestive system, whereas our digestive system's a bit stronger and will
digest the seeds, hence they're a bit more toxic for us.
Our digestive systems are more effective at breaking down plant matter and grazing animals
are even more efficient at doing so, hence Yew is very toxic to cattle/
Now Yew trees have seperate sexes on different trees, so um...you're only gonna find berries
on the female trees... And of course, aside from the um...the edible
berries, another traditional use for Yew trees is using the wood to make longbows.
And this is a Yew lonhgbow here. This one's actually a replica of er..um...one of the
ones that was found on Henry the Eighth's flagship, The Mary Rose. And you can see it's
um.. got the heartwood on the inside there. yeah, quite interesting...and it actually
works. With my boots on, I'm about six foot tall,
so you can see how large this longbow actually is. Anyway, here's my friend John, demonstrating
it a bit more efficiently than I do... The Yew tree has an ancient association with
the supernatural, in particular, an association with death. Perhaps this is due to it's longevity,
or it's poisonous attributes. Perhaps it's due to it's reputation for having hallucinogenic
qualities and accompanying frightening visions. Whatever it is, over the millennia, reluctance
to cut them down has left a legacy of ancient Yew trees, across Britain and Ireland.