Sombre Sentinels in Winter Green
Common Yew (Taxus baccata) or Iúr/Eo in Irish is an evergreen conifer which like another conifer, the Scot’s pine, is native to Ireland (1a). A mutant, upright, fastigate form of the yew is the Irish yew (Taxus baccata ‘Fastiagata’) the original of which was discovered in Florencecourt, Co. Fermanagh in 1767 (1b). The man who…