WE ARE approaching the season of trees and the companions of trees of the oak and the ash, the holly and the ivy and the mistletoe. But there are no songs to the yew no anthems to the oldest evergreen known to the languages of the Indo European peoples. The word is the same across the breadth of the continent, from the Irish Iur, the English yew, the German Eibe, the Dutch Ew, the French if. It is not just one of the oldest words in the languages of the peoples of Europe; it is in our place names too, concealed but present, though all trace of yew might otherwise have vanished. Newrath in Wicklow does not refer to a rath; it is merely a garbled version of An Iruach, the place of yews. Newry is named after a single yew, An tIur.
Killinure is the church of the yew. The tree stalks our placenames as once it must have stalked the conscious mind of the Irish people, at a time when they knew the names of the trees which surrounded them, so that it required no arborealist to name Sallins, the willow grove, or Trim, the elder tree, or all those countless Derrys.
Captivating Tree
But it is the yew which captivates; green throughout the year and the bearer of those wondrous red fruits. Why is it a tree of mourning? Why have we no traditional nursery rhymes or carols about it? Is it because its roots take shapes and designs which we find unnerving, serpentine, a return to the Fall? To walk through a yew wood at night, roots reaching up to seize and hold your ankle, would not have been pleasant; and the fantastic shapes the yew can sometimes throw might have suggested witchcraft and diabolism to our ancestors.
But the yew is clearly one of Thomas Pakenham's favourite trees, to judge from its generous presence in his latest book, Meeting with Remarkable Trees. Such yews grace these pages that it is no wonder he seems to have fallen in love with the species. He says that once the branches of the yew might have carried pagan trophies or the severed heads of sacrificial victims, and its dark green leaves - uniquely available so early in the year - would have been used as fronds for palm Sunday.
Because the tree never seemed to die, and its berries were poisonous, it seemed to represent both death and immortality and yews have long since been planted in cemeteries and churchyards; some of the most beautiful trees - such as the great yew of Muckross or the twin yews of St Edward's in Stowe-on-the-Wold - which Thomas declares his admiration of are located in such places.
It is a perfectly understandable love; for in imagination and unpredictability, the yew exceeds the humble creations of man or woman. Nobody has yet devised a structure to compare with the great yew of Whittinghame in East Lothian from a humble trunk 11 ft in girth, the tree spreads out in dropping and intersecting branches which create a canopy 60 ft high and 400 ft across, a vast twisted unnerving structure beneath which the murder of the Earl of Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots' second husband, was allegedly planned. It is indeed a dark place for a dark deed.
Similar though more modest gothic designs are to be found in the twin yews of Crom in Fermanagh, parents of the Irish yew found all over the world. Is it just a coincidence that "crom" means crooked, or were these twisted, intertwining denizens the reason for the word? Whatever, they are the sole parents of Ireland's greatest arboreal export, to be found all over the world, yet depressingly seldom in Ireland.
Grotesque Contortions
For the evergreen we covet in Ireland are the fast yielding pineal foreigners which are covering our hillsides like a dark and suffocating plague. The grotesque contortions of the free growing yew, or the mannerly habits of the controlled and topiarised Irish yew hedge, have no economic appeal as a crop. Yew planting is almost dead, no doubt because so much tree planning is being done for life time returns.
Meeting with remarkable Trees reminds us of quite another dimension of time, of a rhythm which spans centuries. Take, for example, the great beech hedge at Meildeour in Scotland. It was planted in 1745 by the Nairne family whose menfolk were shortly after called to arms to serve that vain glorious wretch, Bonnie Prince Charlie - the worst of all of Scotland's many catastrophes.
None of the Nairnes returned from the last Jacobite folly, and the hedge was allowed to grow unchecked to honour the vanished Nairnes.
It is now a quarter of a mile long and over 100 ft high, and even in a photograph it is heartstoppingly beautiful.
On the face of the earth, there is nothing so wonderful as a tree. Joyce Kilmer's lines, I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree, irritate because they are disgustingly twee; but in their tweeness they are spot on. There are no seasons when great trees diminish in their greatness.
Greatest Creations
Thomas curses poets who attempt verse about trees, and of course he is right; trees are unpaintable, unversable, uncaptivable. They are the greatest and most beautiful creations on the planet, each one being a miracle of design and construction, nature and science at their most ingenious. Merely think of the engineering required for the great sequoias: what technical brilliance is required to pump the vital sap hundreds of feet from the soil so high into the sky? And the only energy used is sunlight, even in the tepid northern climates of Arctic where vast pines can raise tons of water from the ground. Mankind could never achieve such a feat with such modest resources.
Thomas has been planting tree seeds from around the world in his lands at Tullynally; and they will come to their prime in perhaps generations to come. In the meantime, he has given us a more modestly enduring work, text and photographs by him; a celebration of the most beautiful of the creations on this planet, and still an object of awe among those who revere it. Tree worshippers were right: trees are the truegods of this world.