Yew Berries

Day 62: I don't know if it's myth or fact, but I've heard it said that yew fruits every seventh year. I suspect there's some validation for the statement, although I would think the schedule might be somewhat less rigid. At least in my own observations of the solitary female yew in my hedgerow, I have only seen the berries (arils, actually) appear four or five times in the thirty years I've lived here. Aril. Yes, let's look at that word a little more closely while we're at it. Technically, these little red Christmas ornaments hiding in the deep green shadows are not berries, despite what they look like. "Aril" describes the fleshy outer covering of the seeds of certain plants like yew. In fact, the pips inside a pomegranate are also arils, each containing a single seed. As for the arils of the yew, be strongly advised that although the fleshy portion is considered edible, the seed inside is poisonous! The foliage of the yew is also poisonous when ingested, and the toxins it contains may be absorbed through the skin. That said, yew'd do well to leave the whole plant alone.

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.

A New Yew

Day 51: I've long since given up any hope of finding a new me, so I'll settle for having several new yews instead. In point of fact, the European yew hedge running along the front of my property has two notable inadequacies. The first is that of roughly two dozen individual shrubs, only one is female. The other is that the hedge stops short of the edge of the property by at least another dozen plants. A few years ago, I found a "volunteer" sprout about ten feet away from the orderly row; I transplanted it, and now it's about a foot tall. Obviously, it'll be a few years before I have to worry about trimming it with the rest of the hedge, but at least it's a start on filling in the gap. That said, yesterday I discovered five more volunteers beneath Big Doug. I'll lift them in the spring for relocation to the hedgerow. As in needlework, the most valuable asset a gardener can cultivate is patience.