365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Thursday, December 10, 2020
Yew Will Be Relocating
Day 58: The former owners of my property must have been on a tight budget. They planted a line of two dozen yews (species undetermined) along the front to serve as a hedge, spacing them uniformly until they ran out...about fifty feet from the actual corner of the lot. The remaining space was protected against trespassers by a three-line barbed wire fence which lasted a few years into my tenancy and then fell over. By then, a significant amount of unsightly brush had grown up in the gap where the fence had restricted mowing, so I left it as a deterrent and kept it trimmed back to a manageable mess. Then one day as I was walking around the yard, I spotted a couple of yew seedlings thirty feet from the hedge. At first, I thought they might have been the progeny of the sole female yew in the planting, but then I realized that they had propagated from pruned bits I'd dropped on my way to the burn pile. Nature herself had offered me a solution to the hedge gap, so I transplanted four or five to the line. Only one survived, possibly because I shaved the others off at ground level with the mower, not recalling where I'd put them until it was too late. Now I have another opportunity. I've staked out half a dozen volunteers, the tallest no more than six inches. Yew will be relocating some time this winter.
Labels:
hedge,
propagation,
volunteer,
yew
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