Yew

Yew (Taxus baccata) is a darkly beautiful evergreen tree native to the UK. The oldest trees in Europe are all yews, some of them several thousand years old. As the centuries creep by, the heart often rots out of the trees, leaving a ring of wonderfully contorted new growth around a hollow centre under a dense canopy.

Almost every one of these ancient trees has had a churchyard built around it sometime during the last millennium or so, illustrating the spiritual significance of these trees long before they came to be appropriated by the church. Many yews were also planted in churchyards, especially the upright-growing Irish yew, and these trees give the impression of standing sentinel over the  dead below.

Slow-growing, dark, gnarled and capable of reaching immense age, it's easy to see how these fearsome trees inspired veneration and became associated with death and rebirth. The sense of stillness and ages past is vivid in the shade and silence of an ancient yew.

Yew tunnel, Aberglasney, Wales

St. Edward's church, Gloucestershire

The heartwood of yew is a wonderful rich red-orange deepening to black in places, which contrasts beautifully with the pale golden sapwood. Yew wood is extremely strong and supple, properties that made it ideally suited for use in the great English longbows of medieval warfare.  Yew has long been a favourite of carvers and wood-turners for its  rich colours, its strength and its characterful grain patterns.

I made this curved three-prong fork from part of a large yew branch that I rescued from an abandoned campfire in Roslin Glen, near Edinburgh. You can see the pale sapwood intrusions contrasting with the fantastic grain patterns of the reddish heartwood. Modelled by Ro in the Pennine hills.

This one is mainly sapwood with a heartwood knot at the top, made from part of the same salvaged branch. It was huge and spiky and I had to carry it for miles. I'm glad I did, though, as I've made loads of lovely things out of it and there's still a lot of it left. Yew is a brilliant material for hair toys, being light, strong, flexible, good at holding a smooth finish and, of course, beautiful in colour and grain. Modelled by my Mum Angela in her lovely garden.