Taxus baccata (yew) and another fright!

Yew leaves and berry

Last weekend I went to learn more about edible plants with a professional guide, along with other participants at Vogrie Country Park near Dalkeith. The event was run in partnership with a mindfulness teacher.   We started off beside jack-by-the-hedge (garlic mustard).  I had tasted the leaves in early spring.  They are spent now, summer being the time of fruit and seeds.  I had in recent days been looking for these seeds, but had thought that they too were past.  Here they were though, hidden inside thin finger-like seed pods. Their flavour was pungent, reminiscent of the mustardy leaves. 

Garlic mustard seed cases

We tried some of its leaves fermented and dried although they still felt slightly damp. The leaves may have been wild garlic rather than garlic mustard, I wasn't taking notes at that stage. They had a salty, coastal, smoky flavour, one that I would love to taste again. Luckily, there is a recipe.

   

Later, we tried preserved spruce tips, a sort of caramelised wild candy. The tips had been made into a syrup.  Once the syrup was finished the tips were further preserved by being packed in sugar, layered to prevent mould.   The result, a sweet, chewy, piney delicacy.  Apparently you can do the same with the tips of spruce, larch, pine.  When they are covered in a sheath  you pick the smallest tips from the side branches.  Someone brazenly asked for more.  Our guide generously said "Of course!" To I think to a general feeling of wicked delight, the jar was passed around again.  

We had tastings of a sweet purple wine which might have been elderberry.  Had it been left it might have become a sort of port.  I doubted it would last that long. 

These tastings were interspersed with demonstrations of the spit test for russula mushrooms or how you might make a plaster from a birch bolete we encountered by chance.  Crossing a field I mentioned I had had no success with tasting dock.  Our guide showed me how to take only the base of the plant at this time of year.  This led on to showing  the group how you would make a larger plaster from a dock leaf, using the stalk to bind it and the leaf's mucus to calm a bite or sting. 

Before long we walked below a yew tree.  Our guide mentioned in passing a fact relatively well-known:  all parts of the tree are poisonous, .  

Taxus baccata are dark leaved evergreens. Taxus, I discovered later comes via Greek, from Taxša, the Scythian word for yew (and bow), although according to the University of Wisconsin, 'taxis' means "order or arrangement" and 'baccata' means "carrying berries".  "The words "toxic" and "textile" are derived from the root 'taxus' due to the roots toxicity and its bark's utility as a weaving material".  

The linguistic connections do not make total sense to me, nor is it clear why textile and toxicity are supposed to be connected but you can tease out connections.  Yew clearly was in the past and perhaps still is used for bows, being both strong and flexible.  It is toxic and a local cabinet maker recommended using masks when working with it for that reason.  Apparently, it has some lovely patterns and is a particular yellow.

Yews live to a great age.  In 'The ancient yew: a history of Taxus baccata', Robert Bevan-Jones notes there are ten yews in Britain that are believed to predate the 10th century.  

The Fortingall yew here in Perthshire is estimated, perhaps conservatively, to be about 2000 years old, placing it among the oldest plants in Europe.  Funeral processions would apparently pass through the arch formed by the split trunk.  Visit Scotland places, rather more sensationally, between 3000 and 9000 years old but Robert Bevan Jones believes the age of yews is often overestimated. 

Diversion

Another substantial yew is found at the graves of Betsy Bell and Mary Grey, near Perth.  This seems to be a surprisingly little trod path.  You can hike there along the Almond valley from Cromwellpark.  It is the section after Methven woods and the bridge at Dalcrue that is less well walked and unsigned bar on marker which apparently attempts to keep people away from cattle.  After that, you guess your own way as there is no real path. 

You will find the grave down a steep bank by the river. The two girls tried to evade the plague in the seventeenth century but it sought them out when a boy brought food from Perth to their hiding place and all three succumbed.  

Grave of Betsy Bell and Mary Grey

I wonder if the yew is the same tree dramatically depicted in this early engraving of the same site from the 1845 "Scotland Illustrated".  

The story of this local legend became a well known song (lyrics)and travelled the world. There is the haunting version by English folk rock band Steeleye span or the upbeat, catchy version by the American celtic group Cherish the Ladies.  The story even, in 1878, became the subject of  a Mother Goose nursery rhyme.  

Diversion end.

Yew wood is highly resistant to rot and decay.  The Woodland Trust tells us "One of the World's oldest surviving wooden artefacts is a yew spear head estimated to be around 450,000 years old."

John Aubrey in his Natural History & Antiquities Of The County Of Surrey ("begun in the year 1673") says of the village of Crowhurst:

Ten yards circumference is nine metres! This tree boasted a hollow interior space of about 6 feet, with a doorway and wooden door. Yews are witnesses to centuries of history. In the nineteenth century the same yew was fashioned into a summerhouse, during which modification a cannonball was found inside the tree, believed to have been there since the civil war.

Yews are associated with both life and death. Many reasons are given for why they are often found in churchyards. One commonly cited is because many churches were established on sites of pre-Christian worship in cultures in which the yew may have been important.

The yew was apparently sacred to druids. Druidry.org has many yew stories and states "In early times, the darkly glorious yew-tree was probably the only evergreen tree in Britain".  I am sceptical.  Box, holly and juniper are all native evergreens.  Perhaps they were counting these as shrubs.  Still, Scots pine, our only native pine, is an evergreen tree.  You can see a nationally impressive version near Perth, in Muirward wood, Scone.  It is called the King of the Forest and as I recall is a hundred yards or so off the main path. 

Scots pine, King of the Forest, Muirward wood

I saw it on Halloween towards dusk last year when the wood was distinctly spooky.

 

A Gallic-Germanic people called Eburones by the Romans lived between the Rhine and the Maas. Their name means “the people of the yew” apparently after their places of worship. Whether such tribes planted yews or whether they simply set up next to them and why, is unclear. The website Plant-lore cites similar doubt and suggests various other reasons why yews might be found in churchyards:

Perhaps there are other practical reasons. Nothing grows under a yew due to the thickness of the canopy and the carpet of needles, which does make for easier churchyard maintenance. I have noticed too that in winter yews are particularly good at sucking up snow and ice, leaving the ground below, clear.  Waterlogged or flooded churchyards could be problematic.

Yew, Dunkeld, near the ruined cathedral

The association of the yew with immortality is partly because their fractures seem able to resist disease, unlike most other trees, and because even at a great age they are able to put out new shoots form low in the trunk. 

In one of the many surprising apparent contradictions found in the kingdoms of plant and funghi the tree's highly poisonous taxane alkaloids have been developed as anti-cancer drugs. Whichever way you turn you find the yew, rooted, Janus-like, facing both the start and the end of life.

Passing under the yew in Vogrie our guide continued almost as an aside, "But the pulp around the berry is not toxic.  It's delicious, provided you don't eat the seed.  A few seeds will lay you out in the mortuary.  You wouldn't choose to smoke food by burning yew." 

This sounded like the plant world's version of Russian roulette.  Should you like living dangerously all you need do (other than trying to cycle or cross a road in modern-day Perth) is go for a walk from your house.  There are many deadly species all within an hour's circular walk of my house  on the edge of the city centre.  There will likely be from yours too. Wolfsbane, yew, hemlock, hemlock water dropwort and probably many poisonous mushrooms are all found near me. Even foxglove could kill you in large quantities.  If you mistook lily of the valley for wild garlic and left the subsequent poisoning symptoms untreated, it might prove fatal.

There is a wonderful paragraph in John Wright's River Cottage book about mushrooms, on the edible mushroom Amanita spissa and it's near exact resemblance, bar one small detail, to the deadly Panther Cap.  Dicing with these two would be another example of plant Russian roulette:

   

"Perhaps I shouldn't be telling you this," continued our guide, immediately riveting everyone's attention.  "...but I tell my children about this dangerous tree and the delicious seed pulp.  It's better for them to know what is dangerous than not. As I was digesting this nugget and wondering how old his children were, he ate the berry from the "tree of death", sucked off the pulp and spat out the seed.  

"You know so much", I said later, somewhat awestruck. 
"I grew up with it", he said,  modestly, with a shrug. He was evidently giving his children the same, useful education. 

"Delicious! Like tropical fruit" he exclaimed of his yew berry, with characteristic fizz and enthusiasm.  I had no intention of doing the same. But other participants were rapidly following his lead.  To my surprise I found myself reaching for a berry.  "Live dangerously" passed like a flying banner, through my mind. This was not, I felt the life philosophy characteristic of me.  Still, "Group Poisoned on Foraging Walk" is not a headline I had ever seen or expect to see.  I tried to squish the pulp off in my hand but the berry is very small.  I popped the whole thing in my mouth. "One seed probably wouldn't kill you, in the event you inadvertently ate it." announced our guide. 

I wasn't getting much from the pulp, which was not surprising given that it is about half the size of a pinkie fingernail, but then my obsession with not swallowing the seed probably precluded such nuances as taste.  "Don't touch the seed with your teeth either, in case you scratch it" he said, causing me to nearly swallow the damn thing in fright. I sucked off the pulp and spat out the seed with relief.  I hadn't had any real taste sensation and felt rather dismayed at all that risk for so little result.

"I think I'd rather eat a passionfruit", I breathed to another participant.  

"...apart from the unsustainable food miles," she replied, chasteningly.

During our walk as we happened across various plants our guide regaled us from his store of fascinating facts.  There was no planned itinerary. I felt that we could have come across a cross-section of different plants and he would have still had a great store of stories and knowledge on which to draw.  During the second world war the Germans used nettle hemp for their uniforms.  In Italy, it's illegal to gather mushrooms in anything but a wicker basket, so that the spores may spread.  Deadly wolfsbane is boiled all day in China and eaten.  Funghi have not just two sexes, male and female, but hundreds.  The mushroom we see is only the reproductive organs of the much larger organism, which lives underground or on wood. 

Five minutes or so after eating the yew pulp we stopped beside a lime tree. Our guide started telling us that in Polish Lipiec means July. Its name is derived from lipa the linden or lime tree which flowers in that month.  During the absorption of this fascinating titbit, I started to feel distinctly unwell, dizzy and jelly-like. Within seconds I felt I was about to collapse and stepped forward, reaching out my hand to steady myself on...the air.  It was grasped by the warm and reassuring hand of the mindfulness teacher standing beside me.  Interrupting our foraging teacher mid-flow I announced starkly that I did not feel well.  Everything stopped and everyone was silent while I stood, wobbling. "Let's sit down", somebody suggested.  

Someone else offered me a mat to sit on, our guide poured me some water.  After a minute or two when it seemed I was not about to start convulsing on the forest floor, somebody suggested moving to sit further into the glade.  Our guide offered to help me up.  Someone asked me how I was feeling.  I was still too discomposed to be aware of who this was but replied that I felt shaky.  Our mindfulness teacher mentioned to me she too had experienced something she described as a "wave" after eating the flesh of the yew berry, as had another participant though not with such dramatic effects.  Getting things back on track, sanguinely she suggested this might be a good time to practice mindfulness. I wondered if that's what mindfulness caused you to do:  observe effects rather than react to them.  We all sat down again and followed her prompts in meditation.

After fifteen minutes or so she rang a small dish which made a beautiful bell-like sound, returning us to the normal world. She asked us to comment on how we were feeling and our "internal weather".  Most people's were mixed.  Some of the mothers seemed to share a feeling that since the pandemic they had felt as though under a storm cloud, but that now there were rays of light. I though felt enormous relief that my life was in fact, at least for the time being, continuing. Everyone laughed and my sense of gratitude increased not only for my persisting existence and the restorative connection of laughter but towards all the strangers who had stepped forward in various small ways, to offer support. Of such small tokens are some of the important moments in life composed.   

This sense persisted.  Later, we followed another meditation sitting in a field.  Sitting meditation is not my forte.  I feel inflexible, uncomfortable and too long-limbed to fold mine into the contortions others seem to manage with ease sitting calmly straight and poised.  I realised I was sitting below a large beech tree. "Never camp below a beech tree" had been one of the snippets our guide had shared with us.  The branches are prone to crash down, unexpectedly. Sitting below a heavy branch I recalled that beeches used to be known as "widow-makers".  Beech woods at this time of year are noisy.  What must have been the beech masts (seeds) falling continuously to the floor sounded to me like the faint cracks preceding a branch falling on my head.  I felt I could not disrupt the silent meditation by moving.  The tree was big and the only refuge further out under the hot sun, which I preferred to avoid.  Long minutes ticked by.            

The remainder of the walk passed with much of interest and nothing of alarm. At the end, sitting on the grass, we enjoyed a delicious, foraged meal prepared by our host. The centrepiece was one of the richest, most flavoursome vegan stews that I have ever tasted.  It consisted of wild mushrooms and garden vegetables, accompanied by wild garlic pesto on bread, fresh garden salad and a cep carpaccio garnished with spicy nasturtium flowers. 

                             

 

At the end of the day our mindfulness teacher asked us to describe our feelings in one word. Mine was "gratitude".  It described surviving the perils of nature, enjoying the delicious food and the luck in meeting the helpful and interesting people in the group. 

I had learned too from other participants, including a Polish woman who summed up the confusing world of foraging pragmatically.  "In Poland, we have a saying:  All the mushrooms are edible, some of them only once."