Almost immediately on entering St Helen’s churchyard I could see its most wonderful occupant. It’s a yew tree, at least of equal age to the adjacent 12th-century building, but reputed to be as old as Christianity itself.
Like all veteran trees I’ve experienced, it is memorable not for its postcard beauty or elegance, and certainly not for its evocation of some Platonic ideal of the tree of life. What assails you is the monumental imperfection.
Its trunk appears to have been shorn of the wilder pubic epicormic growth common to this species, but it’s still a bristling hog’s-back of a bole. The thing surges as one muscular rising stem, but it also twists and ripples and buckles back on itself. By head height, any singularity in that eight-metre girth has dissolved into a chaos of lesser branches, some of which are dead or hollowed out with rot. Above, amid the detail of the fretwork foliage, all sense of human order is gone and what ascends there is magnificence entirely on its own terms.
Yews, perhaps more than any other trees, possess something that gets to the heart of why we love these ancient veterans. Ironically, it is manifest most completely in a yew that stands just next to this oldest one at St Helen’s. This other monster is but 2.5 metres about its waist, and its upper canopy surges up then swoops down writhing like limbs about an octopus. This illustrates something noted by Richard Williamson in his book The Great Yew Forest: the species’ capacity to flow and sway in liquid shapes. Yews may be celebrated for wood harder than iron, but they often suggest many of the properties of water.
They are, of course, like all plants, made largely of water, and we see in the oldest organisms both their obdurate, awkward centuries-long hold on existence, yet also the moment-by-moment green grace by which they capture photons of light and turn water to carbohydrate fuel for new life. They are both alive to the light of each passing second, but they store in those archives of wounded lignin a profound story of their lived past.
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