A New Champion Yew

In the thick of a scotch broom farm

Spying yews. Here is a good challenge for the Cascadia naturalist-spy, seeker of special trees. It’s become one of my addictive tics this year.

Like last spring, tromping with the owners of a sheep farm–nature preserve to a ravine edge, just past where they allow their beef to roam, where we stop to take in some nice big cedars and maples. Hold on, it dawns on me after several minutes, this is a yew right here, isn’t it, the one growing just past the lip of the ravine?

We investigate, and I show the couple what makes it a Pacific yew: lustrous dark green needles that are wide, flat and ranked in a horizontal plane (a lot like coast redwood needles); bark that is thin and sometimes peeling in plates; an overkill of branches coming off the trunk at steep angles; moss on the limbs more luxuriant than the tree’s own foliage.

In winter another trait it shares with coast redwood makes it a little easier to spot: the year’s new growth, an inch-long spray at the end of each twig, stays light green.

I have yet to find a “fruiting” yew on the Key Peninsula, which would make identification a cinch. Birds apparently love the bright red “berries”—which are technically arils, fleshy seed coverings that are the one non-toxic part of a yew.

The couple regards the small tree as if it is a superb inheritance they aren’t sure they deserve, hiding in plain sight. “Thank yew,” they email that night.

Or like this fall, up a double creek drainage where the road is still dirt, the homes as yet unbuilt. On one slope I become aware of a low thicketlike yew among the salmonberry. You have to move slow to find yews. Rare and solitary, among loads of other conifers they are hard to register. Here the thicketlike yew has company: one by one emerges a loose troop of mostly younger yews. At the top of a switchback, where a sign notifies a public that is unlikely ever to venture this far of a house to come, a cable gate is looped around a fir on one side and a yew on the other: the biggest yew I have yet seen.

Which isn’t saying a whole lot. Pacific yew is a smallish understory tree, slow-growing, slow to establish, often leaning hard to find the occasional shafts of light that trickle into our older forests. It is a creature—at least it feels like a creature, an eventual product of undisturbed forest, like Sasquatch—with wood that is dense, heavy, stiff yet flexible, hence prized by bow makers.

Prized too, I’ve found, by the property owners who are lucky enough to have one and have learned to see it.

This yew measures 15 inches diameter at breast height and 38 feet tall. On the edge of the road its foliage falls in cascades. Its skin has begun to grow around the cable. Writing this now, I wonder if it is the mother of the yews growing downslope.

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That is a beautiful yew. But this week I get to pay a visit to one that proves a hell of a bit larger.

A friend tips me off to it. She sends pictures. Still I am not prepared for the setting in which it is growing.

Surviving is probably a better word. The friend, a retired nurse turned forester, takes me on a circuitous route through the mixed 20-acre forest she is painstakingly rewilding. We arrive at a neighboring clearcut she calls the Scotch Broom Farm. We pick our way into the thick of it using a road that is being swallowed by blackberry canes. On either side towers a mass of scotch broom and blackberry that utterly dominates.

The cut happened in 2016. It was replanted, apparently, but there has been little follow up. It has become one of those lost landscapes—lost local forest—that to me are a sin more ultimate than the clearcutting of trees: abandoned after a quick profit to the invasive species that will outcompete our native trees given half a chance, especially on such a large (25 acre), exposed and soil-disturbed site. People ask why there is so much bellyaching about invasive species. Why not just accept them as additions to our flora? This is why. These ones destroy the natural process of succession that would otherwise lead to a regrown forest.

It isn’t straight tangle, though, as I am relieved to find when we emerge into a cleared area. Here is big sky, scattered trash, piles of cut scotch broom, some young firs, and the concrete foundation of a recently razed metal building.

And there is the yew.

Left standing just beyond the foundation with only a few stretched-out madronas for company, amid the slash and brambles, the yew cuts a weirdly dramatic shape, its upswept arms holding thin clouds of foliage that remind me of a prairie storm with terraces of vaporizing rain, its entirety unhidden by any surroundings yet its parts streaked and somehow hazy. I don’t know. It looks weird. Like a Chinese ink painting of a tree.

You should feel how hot it is here in summer, my friend says.

You’d think measuring such a tree would be easy. The height is no problem (I use a laser hypsometer): 42 feet. But getting to the trunk to run my tape around it, that is an ordeal. I am in boots and Carharts, and thus clad I hack my way through blackberries all the time without fuss, but the breed in this clearcut is something special. Loosely arcing over the abused soil, the waist-high canes are almost purple and hard to the touch; they crunch and whip stiffly when I cut them with the clippers I carry. The thorns are wicked sharp. At the tree itself the canes have used remnant huckleberry as a trellis to climb the trunk, making a cone of hazardous greenery that pushes us back as we try to get to where we can lean in and reach around the trunk.

Anyway, this yew has a diameter at breast height of 23.2 inches. Its average crown spread is 36 feet. So, drumroll please. Its champion tree points: 124.

Writing these numbers down, trying to do math while a scratch bleeds on my pen, I have to stop, reach out and touch the trunk, look up into the clouds of foliage—thick green needles now twisted and faintly orange from exposure—and imagine how each of its off-center branches had found a shaft of light that illuminated those needles for perhaps an hour or two a day, when certain angles aligned, back when big trees surrounded the yew.

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Beyond the yew my friend takes me on a little tour. Here is the open trash pit that the logger repurposed as the foundation for a mountain of slash. Here is a zone where neighbors have taken it upon themselves to carve back the scotch broom, revealing lost Doug fir seedlings that are responding well to being given half a chance. Here are piles of cut scotch broom, a new fire hazard. Here comes a troop of bushtits. Here, at the bottom of a mucky alder-covered slope, is a small pond, obviously manmade, supporting a few impressive cedars. We catch glints of gold in the dark water. Goldfish. Feral goldfish!

It is all strange, with a blasted feeling, and as we walk, stepping over disintegrating dog toys, our conversation probes this place’s recent history, which is a saga my friend has witnessed firsthand and over which, when I apologize and ask for the umpteenth clarification about who and when and how, she just laughs and says that to her it’s like a creek with all kinds of braids and pools.

The gist of this parcel is that it’s had four owners in the last few decades, none of them resident. The first brought his dogs here. The second was a couple who cleared a place to park their camper and planted a garden and created features like the open trash pit. They had vague plans to move here. Things changed when they had medical and thus financial trouble. As they began to think about selling the property, they learned that a likely outcome was that the highest bidder would be a land flipper who would log it and resell it. Why, they asked, would they let that guy make a couple hundred grand off the trees on top of the sale price? So they had it logged themselves.

Pretty soon they had to sell it too. The third owner was a local woman who could not bear to see land treated in this way. The fourth and final owner, via donation, is our local land trust.

What will happen here? my friend asks.

We both know that the land trust does not have the people power to give this place the intensive care it could really use. The land trust does shrewd work piecing together important land to protect—these 25 acres connect with a larger preserve of intact forest and shoreline—but as the land trust freely admits, it’s far easier to drum up money for land acquisition. Stewardship? It’s tough. You’d need a dedicated team for each place like this. And where are those people? Who are they? What has happened to time in the 21^st century, and attention and labor? Why have they become so slippery?

Say someone did emerge, I ask my friend, a neighbor maybe, who could only do a little, not the whole thing. What should they focus on?

You mean how would you triage it? asks the retired nurse. Hmm.

It is a question that dogs the rest of the walk as we attempt to spy into this lost landscape’s future. This is deep in the peninsula, deep in an unholy tangle, under an unrelentingly open sky. Everywhere are traces of abuse. Something keen in the place calls out, whimpers like an itchy dog. I can’t quite catch it, the glimpse of the forest it might yet become, yet I feel the echoes of work past and work possible. Call it a spy’s intuition. There is more at play here than meets the eye.

The yew, we pass it again—so far the Key Peninsula champion yew—and from its place rooted in soil now smashed and infested it suggests to us with what seems like utmost dignity, with not a trace of begging in its bearing, this informant of past forest lives, that any kind of shade would sure be nice. However it might be provided.

There will be more to come from this place.

Two views of the Scotch Broom Farm yew. Chris Rurik

Bonus question: What is a third trait, rare among conifers, that yew shares with redwood? If you don’t have it already, check out Northwest Trees by Stephen Arno and Ramona Hammerly for the answer.

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Thanks for joining me on this expedition. Feel free to share with folks yew know who like trees. For more on the Infinite Peninsula, see here. Your support keeps me going!