Trees of life and death

Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his pioneering works on ancient woodland? He certainly pointed out more than 40 years ago that 10,000 centurion oaks ‘are not a substitute for one 500-year-old oak’. Since then, shelves of books have been written on these veterans, and in The Long, Long Life of Trees Fiona Stafford makes a welcome and entertaining contribution.

She draws on material from fields including folklore, natural science, literature, cultural history, European art, ancient mythology and modern medicine to illuminate such trees’ central place in western civilisation. Sometimes all of these are skilfully blended in her accounts of different species.

The yew is a good example. Stafford repeats Robert Graves’s claim in The White Goddess that it was ‘the death-tree in all European countries’ to help explain the presence of so many ancient yews in British graveyards. Some of the best-known examples — at Much Marcle in Herefordshire or Cumbria’s Watermillock — are 1,500 years old and even older, while many long pre-date Christianity in Britain. The likelihood is that an earlier pagan reverence for yew played a part in shaping subsequent religious practice. We should perhaps think of the arrangement less as yews in churchyards and more as churches repeating the location of sacred trees.

The author further points out that yew contains highly toxic alkaloids in all of its physical parts and is thus an occasional aid to modern suicides as well as a cause of accidental death. Both Gray in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ and Sylvia Plath in ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ traded on such darker associations, and Stafford, an Oxford professor of English literature, is attentive to these references.