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.