-- Nay, Traveller! rest.

 

Buds of male flowers on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 19 February 2023.

It's tempting to say, "a male yew". Although, as with many other dioecious plants, individual yews have occasionally been known to change sex, or to speak more accurately, change the sex of the flowers they produce. 

Buds of male flowers on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 19 February 2023.

Each "bud" is actually a cluster of buds enclosed within a transparent membrane.

Open male flowers on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 1 March 2023.

Ten days later, the cluster pushes out of its membrane (now revealed as multiple scales) and the buds open. Puhpowee.*

Each time I brushed the foliage I was immersed in a cloud of pollen. Sometimes a puff of breeze can make the tree look as if it's on fire.

*

* A word in the Potawatomi language. 

I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pine... 

I could spend a whole day listening. And a whole night. And in the morning, without my hearing it, there might be a mushroom that was not there the night before, creamy white, pushed up from the pine needle duff, out of darkness to light, still glistening with the fluid of its passage. Puhpowee.

... My first taste of the missing language was the word Puhpowee on my tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay, in a treatise on the the traditional uses of fungi by our people. Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight".

(Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), p. 48, 49.)

Later, at a tribal gathering, "I learned that the mystical word Puhpowee is used not only for mushrooms, but also for certain other shafts that rise mysteriously in the night" (p.54).

That's two useful words in a single paragraph,  because I didn't know "duff" either (decaying vegetable matter on forest floor). I found myself looking with new eyes at the duff beneath these yew trees.

Open male flowers on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 1 March 2023.

Open male flowers on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 1 March 2023.

On the female tree, by contrast, it looks as if not much is happening.

"Female" Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 3 March 2023.

But in fact the flowers are here, though very unobtrusive:

Female flowers on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 3 March 2023.

They look like buds, but are receptive of pollen. They are green at first and then brown. 

More noticeable are these "artichoke galls", made by the gall fly Taxomyia taxi:

Gall of Taxomyia taxi on Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 3 March 2023.

Debris beneath a female Yew (Taxus baccata). Frome, 6 March 2023.

The seed contents are highly poisonous to humans but palatable to some other creatures, for example squirrels, dormice, hawfinches, nuthatches, and marsh tits. (Blackbirds and thrushes swallow the whole fruit, but the seed passes through the gut unbroken.)

Male flowers on an Irish Yew (Taxus baccata 'Fastigiata'). Tytherington, 12 March 2023.

The fascinating variety known as the Irish Yew, with needles radiating all round the stem. All plants are cuttings deriving from a single specimen found in Co. Fermanagh in the eighteenth century. The plant is a dense shrub with multiple small pinnacles.

More about yew trees:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/03/unrejoicing-berries.html