NAS (134) - acted shamefully, 1; acts shamefully, 3; ashamed, 60; ashamed at all, 1; became anxious, 1; become dry, 1; been confounded, 1; been put, 8; been put to shame, 8; been shamed, 1; brings shame, 1; covered with shame, 1; delayed, 1; disappointed, 2; feel...shame, 1; put me to shame, 1; put them to shame, 1; put to shame, 32; shame, 1; shamed, 3; shameful, 1; shames, 1; utterly dejected, 1; utterly put, 1; utterly put to shame,

23; righteous, 10; righteousness, 1; NAS (41) - acquit, 1; acquitted, 1; declare you right, 1; do justice, 1; give him justice, 1; just, 2; justified, 5; justifies, 1; justify, 5; justifying, 2; lead the to righteousness, 1; made your appear righteous, 2; properly restored, 1; proved right, 1; proved...righteous, 1; right, 4; righteous, 9; vindicated, 1; vindicates, 1;

NAS (68) - adornment, 1; charm, 1; charming, 1; favor, 51; grace, 8; graceful, 2; gracious, 3; pleases, 1; favour, grace, charm favour, grace, elegance favour, acceptance good, pleasant, agreeable pleasant, agreeable (to the senses) pleasant (to the higher nature) good, excellent (of its kind) good, rich, valuable in estimation good, appropriate, becoming better (comparative)

glad, happy, prosperous (of man's sensuous nature) good understanding (of man's intellectual nature) good, kind, benign good, right (ethical) n m a good thing, benefit, welfare welfare, prosperity, happiness good things (collective) good, benefit moral good n f welfare, benefit, good things welfare, prosperity, happiness good things (collective)bounty KJV (559) - beautiful, 2; best, 8; better, 72; fair, 7; fairer, 2; favour, 2; fine, 3; glad, 2; good, 361; goodly, 9; goodness, 16; merry, 7; misc, 35; precious, 4; prosperity, 6; wealth, 3; well, 20;

NAS (486) - beautiful, 11; beneficial, 1; best, 7; better, 75; better a good, 1; charming, 1; cheerful, 3; choice, 2; delightful, 1; enjoy, 1; fair, 1; favor, 1; favorable, 3; favorably, 3; festive, 1; fine, 3; fine ones, 1; fit, 1; generous, 1; glad, 1; good, 262; good and to those who, 1; good is better, 1; good man, 3; good men, 1; good thing, 3; good things, 2; good-looking, 1; goodness, 1; gracious, 1; graciously, 1; handsome, 4; happiness, 1; happy, 2; holiday, 3; intelligent, 1; kind, 1; like, 1; man, 1; more, 2; one, 1; one who, 2; one who is good, 1; one who is pleasing, 1; pleasant, 3; please, 2; pleased, 1; pleases, 1; pleasing, 5; precious, 3; prosperity, 8; pure, 1; richer, 1; right, 1; ripe, 3; safely, 1; sound, 1; splendid, 1; sweet, 1; upright, 1; very well, 1; well, 7; well off, 1; what is good, 16; what seems best, 1; what seems good, 2; what was good, 2; whatever you like, 1; who are good, 1; wish, 2; worthy, 1; favour, supplication, supplication for favour favour supplication for favour KJV (25) - favour, 1; grace, 1; supplication, 23; NAS (25) - grace, 1; mercy, 1; petition, 4; supplication, 18; supplications, 1; grace that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness: grace of speech good will, loving-kindness, favour

to have i.e. own, possess external things such as pertain to property or riches or furniture or utensils or goods or food etc. used of those joined to any one by the bonds of natural blood or marriage or friendship or duty or law etc, of attendance or companionship to hold one's self or find one's self so and so, to be in such or such a condition to hold one's self to a thing, to lay hold of a thing, to adhere or cling to to be closely joined to a person or a thing

NAS (647) - ability, 1; able, 1; accompany, 1; acknowledge, 1; am, 2; become, 1; been, 3; being, 1; being under, 1; bringing, 1; conceived, 1; consider, 2; considered, 2; could, 2; derive, 1; deriving, 1; devoid, 1; enjoyed, 1; experiencing, 1; felt, 1; following, 1; get, 2; gripped, 1; had, 80; has, 134; have, 283; have had, 2; having, 50; held, 1; hold, 5; holding, 7; holds, 2; ill, 5; incurring, 1; involves, 1; keep, 3; keeping, 3; kept, 1; maintain, 1; maintained, 1; maintaining, 1; meets, 1; nearby, 1; next, 2; obliged, 1; obtain, 2; obtained, 1; owned, 3; possess, 2; possessed, 4; possesses, 1; receive, 1; received, 1; recover, 1; regard, 2; regarded, 1; reigns, 1; remember, 1; retain, 1; seize, 1; show, 1; think, 1; unable, 1; under, 1; use, 1; without, 3;

service (of God) KJV (141) - act, 2; bondage, 8; effect, 1; labour, 1; misc, 5; serve, 2; service, 96; servile, 12; servitude, 2; tillage, 2; work, 10; NAS (143) - bondage, 4; construction, 2; construction work, 1; job, 2; kind of service, 2; labor, 9; laborious, 12; labors, 1; ministry, 2; office, 1; rite, 3; rural, 1; service, 79; serving, 1; servitude, 2; tilled, 1; use, 1; work, 18; workers, 1; KJV (290) - do, 15; dress, 2; ear, 2; labour, 2; misc, 14; servant, 5; serve, 227; service, 4; till, 9; work, 5; worshippers, 5;

NAS (289) - become slaves, 1; been slaves, 1; bondage, 2; burdened, 2; cultivate, 7; cultivated, 2; cultivates, 1; do, 6; do the work, 1; enslaved, 3; given, 1; holding in bondage, 1; imposed, 1; keep, 2; labor, 3; laborers, 2; make servant, 1; make slaves, 2; manufacturers, 1; observe, 1; perform, 9; performed, 2; plowed, 1; rendered, 1; serve, 141; served, 52; serves, 2; serving, 5; slave, 1; slaves, 1; subject, 1; till, 1; tiller, 1; tills, 2; use as slaves, 1; used, 1; uses services, 1; work, 7; worked, 2; workers, 2; working, 1; worship, 7; worshipers, 6;

to be hostile to, to be an enemy to (Qal) to be hostile to to treat as an enemy KJV (1) - enemy, 1; NAS (281) - enemies, 196; enemies', 2; enemy, 79; enemy to your enemies, 1; enemy's, 1; foes, 2; to work, serve (Qal) to labour, work, do work to work for another, serve another by labour to serve as subjects to serve (God) to serve (with Levitical service)

KJV (76) - Jew, 74; Jew + , 1; Judah, 1; NAS (75) - Jew, 10; Jewish, 4; Jews, 59; Jews', 1; Judeans, 1; KJV (6) - Jews' language, 5; Jews' speech, 1; NAS (6) - Judean, 4; language of Judah, 2; man man, male (in contrast to woman, female) husband human being, person (in contrast to God) servant mankind champion great man whosoever each (adjective)

NAS (1220) - Benjamite, 3; Ishi, 1; adulteress, 1; all, 1; another, 2; any, 6; any man, 21; any man's, 4; any one, 3; anyone, 1; archers, 1; certain, 6; champion, 2; counselor, 1; counselors, 1; deserve, 1; each, 5; each had another, 1; each his man, 1; each man, 37; each man's, 3; each one, 37; each one by another, 1; each person, 1; eloquent, 1; every, 1; every man, 38; every man's, 7; every one, 8; everyone, 3; expert, 1; farming, 1; father, 1; fellow, 3; fellows, 2; friend, 1; friends, 1; high, 1; himself, 1; hunter, 1; husband, 65; husband's, 1; husbands, 4; idiot, 1; keepers, 2; liar, 1; male, 2; man, 746; man against another, 1; man of each, 1; man the men, 1; man your husband, 1; man's, 21; man's are the men, 1; manchild, 1; mankind, 1; marry, 1; marrying, 1; men, 1; men at one, 1; men's, 1; no, 1; none, 10; one, 89; one of men, 1; one's, 1; oppressor, 1; ordinary, 1; own, 1; people, 3; person, 5; persons, 2; prime, 1; rank, 1; respective, 1; sailors, 1; slanderer, 1; soldiers, 3; some, 8; son, 1; steward, 1; swordsmen, 1; this one, 1; this one and that one, 1; those, 1; those who, 3; tiller, 1; together, 1; traders, 2; tradition, 1; traveler, 1; troop, 1; warriors, 3; whoever, 3;

ABADDON destruction, the Hebrew name (equivalent to the Greek Apollyon, i.e., destroyer) of “the angel of the bottomless pit” (Revelation 9:11). It is rendered “destruction” in Job 28:22; 31:12; 26:6; Proverbs 15:11; 27:20. In the last three of these passages the Revised Version retains the word “Abaddon.” We may regard this word as a personification of the idea of destruction, or as sheol, the realm of the dead.

FOR botanist, artist, poet, or moralist, few trees have so unique an interest as the Yew. Wearing the serious aspect of age even in youth, its somber foliage, massive trunk, and rugged bark form a striking emblem of immortality. Its very name is mysterious in its simple brevity, and has been traced back to the sacred word for Jehovah, the Immortal. In Latin and in Portuguese, iva; in Old German, iua; in Welsh, yw; in Anglo-Saxon, eow; in Old English, iw, ew, ewe, eugh, and uhe; in French, if; in Swedish, id; and in modern German, eibe, "we find," says Dr. Prior, "the Yew so inextricably mixed up with the Ivy that, dissimilar as are the two trees, there can be no doubt that these names are in their origin identical."

Its hard, durable, reddish wood presents characters that enable us readily to recognize it in the peat-beds of pre-historic times. In the bogs of Ireland, Scotland, and Cumberland, in the Cambridgeshire fens and the submerged "moor-logs" at the mouth of the Thames, it is as perfectly preserved as bog-oak, being of a rich brown tint; and under the microscope this exhibits in the woody fibers, as when alive, a unique combination of "bordered pits" and spiral lines.

The wood of the Yew, which, from being susceptible of a high polish, used to be much valued in cabinet-work, is not, as is often thought, exceptionally slow in forming. The contrary opinion has been formed from a consideration of the slowly-increasing girth of those charge trunks of aged Yews which are so disproportionately large, as compared with the extent of bough and leafage, that the formation upon them of the very thinnest growth of wood represents really a very fair total cubic amount.

From the measurement of the layers of annual growth in many Yews, De Candolle concluded that it was within the mark to reckon their increase in diameter at a line a year throughout their life, and it was from such measurements that he concluded that such trees as sometimes occur with a girth of twenty-seven feet, or more, may even have passed the age of two thousand years.

As an evergreen, overshadowing the crops, the Yew would do more harm than larger and perhaps more valuable deciduous trees, and the herdsman must soon have discovered that it was frequently fatal to his cattle, so that it is not to be wondered at that the species should have become less abundant in our hedgerows than it once was. Bearing the staminate and pistillate flowers on different trees, one individual would moreover, if solitary, be unable to reproduce itself by means of seed.

There were, however, many cogent reasons why some specimens of the tree should be preserved. Ages before Christianity had invested the gloomy evergreen of gnarled red trunk and vastly superhuman longevity with a glamour of superstitious awe and veneration, the fancies of the uneducated had, no doubt, surrounded it with a halo of poetic romance; but we have no positive evidence connecting it with Druidical worship. It is not improbable, however, that its green boughs, "renewing their eternal youth," may have been connected with the Spring festival of Eostre, which the Christian Church was able to sanctify and adopt, as it adopted also the winter use of the Holly, which lent itself yet more readily to Christian symbolism; whilst it was unable to do the same for the Mistletoe, which social progress has gradually stripped of all its impropriety, and of nearly all its significance. As the pagan nations of antiquity in South Europe took the Cypress as a symbol of immortality, so the Yew may well have been adopted in the north; and certain it is that whilst the Holly lingers round ancient British earth-works, and has long effected its entrance into our churches, it does not occur in our churchyards. Even the additional argument that Yew twigs were used to sprinkle the holy water in the "Asperges" before mass will hardly be a sufficient answer to this objection.

It is not only for Easter decorations that Yew-boughs are utilized by the Church; for, out of the lands of palms and olives, the Catholic Church has to make shift with Willow and Yew on Palm Sunday, so that the latter tree has in many districts acquired the name of "palm," though Willows are more generally so called. That staunch Protestant, William Turner, need not have opened, as he does, the vials of his wrath upon the Popish priests for this custom as a deception, since the prayers in the mass for the day expressly add the words, "and other trees," after mentioning palm and olive. In the Churchwardens' Accounts for Woodbury, Devon, in 1775, it is recorded "That a Yew or Palm tree was planted in the churchyard, ye south side of the church, in the same place where one was blown down by the wind a few days ago, this 25th of November."

Man is apt in all ages to be utilitarian, and if the shade of the "dismal Yew" had once been a rendezvous for the clan where the Druid, as chief medicine-man, dispensed justice and wisdom, it was, no doubt, soon found desirable that the material for the chief weapons of the day should be enclosed, that it might not be browsed, with results possibly fatal, by the cattle. It is probably to this use of it for making bows that the tree owes its Latin name of Taxus. Thus in his earliest botanical work, "Libellus de re herbaria" (1538), William Turner writes: "Taxes an uhe tre unde hodie apud nos fiunt arcus;" and the poet Spenser, in 1590, speaks of it as--

"The Yew is hot and dry, having such attraction that if planted near a place subject to poysonous vapours, its very branches will draw and imbibe them. For this reason it was planted in churchyards, and commonly on the west side, which was at one time considered full of putrefaction and gross oleaginous gasses exhaled from the graves by the setting sun. These gasses, or will-o'-the-wisps, divers have seen, and believed them dead bodies walking abroad. Wheresoever it grows it is both dangerous and deadly to man and beast; the very lying under its branches has been found hurtful, yet the growing of it in churchyard is useful."

This belief in the fatal effect of even sleeping under the boughs of the Yew dates from Galen and Dioscorides; whilst Caesar records the death of Catibulus, king of the Eburones, from drinking its juice. Gerard, however in his "Herball" (1579), rashly denies all this, saying," All which I boldly affirm as untrue, because I have eaten my full of the berries, and slept in the branches, not once but oft, without hurt."

The facts would seem to be that the seeds themselves are poisonous, but the fleshy pink cup, or "aril," as the botanists term it, of which children are so fond, is harmless. As to the boughs and leaves, it appears that cattle can be gradually accustomed to them when mixed with other food; but that, either when green, or when cut and half withered, they have been repeatedly fatal to horses oxen, sheep, and deer. Gilbert White was probably right when he said that it was "either from wantonness when full, or from hunger when empty," that the Yew is eaten by them with fatal consequences. Though the leaves are believed to act as a vermifuge, they are likely to be equally fatal to children, the poison acting either on the cerebrospinal nerves or directly on the heart.

'Dark yew that graspest at the stone And dippest towards the dreamless head . . .' wrote Tennyson in a funereal mood. The human race is born and dies, but yew trees live forever. You do not have to be a Tennyson to respond to their deep, disturbing, uncalculated age. William Watson certainly was not poet laureate material, but the silent presences of Merrow Down's yew wood inspired him all the same:-

A profound question. Let us spoil the poetry by answering it. There was once a man who was called up to join the army. They asked him all the usual questions, down to the last one on the form: what was his religion? 'Methuselahite', he replied. Come again? `It means', said the reluctant soldier, 'that I'm going to stay alive as long as I bloody well can'. Now the yew tree is the original Methuselahite, and everything about it is framed to live forever.

Yew grows slowly. Even when young it will only increase its girth half as fast as other forest trees, because it is laying down hard, closegrained wood. That imparts immense strength to the trunk and branches and - from the viewpoint of mortal men - provides durable wood for carving and turning as well as making those famous bows.

With age the yew becomes less straight, 'an unsmooth tree . . . roots twisted in the earth' as the Rune Poem says, but it does not lose its strength. Trees know nothing of old age or death: they grow on and on until accident finishes them off. It is growth itself which makes them vulnerable. Each year a fresh ring is added to the trunk and branches, drawing on the energy provided by the canopy of leaves. Each successive ring is therefore larger than the last, while the crown of leaves stays the same, having reached a point beyond which the framework of the tree can support no more. At last most trees will snap under their own weight, or keel over in storms: but the yew knows a trick or two. It can turn disease into health by allowing fungal infections to eat up its heartwood, leaving a hollow tree which, such is the tensile strength of all that twisted wood, continues to support the heavy crown of leaves. Meanwhile branches loop down under their own weight until they touch the ground, and there they set root. A young branch may even touch down into the leafmould inside the hollow trunk, and then the tree renews itself from within; or the spread of disease may split the trunk into staves, each bowing out to root itself individually, so that a single tree is transformed into a grove.

The last trick of the yew defeats time itself. The tree simply stops growing. There is no increase in girth, no annual ring. Having reached a sufficient size, it remains stable; it may resume growth, or not; and barring accidents, it can stay the same size until Doomsday. So it is no simple matter to discover the age of a yew tree, and until recently most authorities had given it up as a bad job. The revival of interest in the yew, not just as a tree but as a sacred tree, is due to the work of one man, the remarkable Allen Meredith. Meredith is first and foremost a visionary. In the 1970s he received a number of dreams about the meaning of the yew, about its immortality and its powers of wisdom and healing. Unlike most visionaries, he responded to this by getting on his bike and beginning a series of encounters with hundreds of yew trees, measuring and recording them. A self-taught man, Meredith followed up every reference he could find on old yews and single-handedly bridged the gap between mystic intuition and professional biology. He has convinced leading figures, including David Bellamy and Alan Mitchell of the Tree Register, that yews are vastly older - thousands of years older, in some cases - than anyone had realised. He has not convinced me; at least, not in the published version of his work. I shall be showing why. But it is only fair to add that to refute Meredith, a researcher must rely on the immense corpus of information which he has assembled.

He has, for instance, uncovered 37 references to yews planted at various times since the Reformation, and still existing [1]. The statistics of these trees can be plotted out to give an idea of growth rates - once we know that a tree planted in (say) 1780 is now (say) seven feet in girth, then we can deduce, as a general principle, that the yew grows one foot in 30 years. It is not quite as simple as that, because individual trees differ in their powers of growth - in fact there is a variation of plus or minus five feet from the mean among trees older than 200 years - but the general pattern is clear. The observations of Victorian naturalists, who were measuring younger specimens, suggest a brisker rate of growth - one foot every 20-25 years [2].

But things are different when we come to the really old yews, the veterans of above 20 feet in girth. Nobody knows when they were planted: it is open to doubt whether some were ever planted by human hand at all. But antiquaries have measured the most famous specimens repeatedly since the seventeenth century, and here again we can draw on Meredith's researches, since he has collated figures for 11 of the best-known veterans [3].

The claim that 'old yews grow more slowly than young ones' is not true, if it is taken to mean a gradual deceleration in the growth rate proportionate to the size of the tree. The largest veteran of which there is a full record, the churchyard yew of Darley Dale (32-3 feet) is not growing any slower than the smallest, Church Preen (22-3 feet). Admittedly the sample is small: and comparisons are rendered absurd by another factor. Many of these trees are not growing at all. Totteridge is the best instance. 26 feet in girth in 1677, this tree has been measured on four subsequent occasions, up to the present, without variation. When the Last Trump blows and the dead scramble out of Totteridge churchyard, that tree may still be there, and if it is, it will still be 26 feet round the trunk.

All the other veterans have been through similar periods of inaction. It seems that stability lasts for the tree until its ecological stasis is broken by a variation in the available sunshine or soil, or through the loss of a branch; then growth recommences at a quite lively rate - one foot in 40 years - until its work is done, after which there is renewed stability.

That is interesting for botanists, but frustrating for the student of antiquities. It makes it impossible to tell how old a yew tree really is, since there is no telling how often it may have ceased to grow in its life, or for how long. Remember our formula of one foot in 30 years, with an allowance of five feet either way for individual variation. On these grounds, a tree 30 feet in girth must date to at least 750 years old, which is AD 1250. But that is a minimum estimate. There is no maximum. All one can say is that trees, like other landscape features, should be regarded as recent until proof is forthcoming that they are old. There are a lot of forces ranged against the life of a tree, man not least amongst them, and to survive the centuries it helps to have had some protective significance in human culture. In the warm, dry lands that fringe the Mediterranean South there flourish many evergreen trees - cypress, holm oak and laurel as well as yew. The ancients planted these in cemeteries, moved by the contrast between the undying tree and the sad graves around it, and also concerned to set up a durable signifier that this land had been devoted to burials and was not to be broken up for the plough. Cypress and yew therefore became the trees of mourning; their branches were hung up after a death; the Furies carried torches of yew, and consecrated the dead with them [4]. In our own northerly clime, the yew is the only evergreen (barring holly) to grow below the conifer belt, and so it carries a greater symbolic weight. Its toxic foliage, both lethal and undying, stands for death and immortality at once.

In the far-ranging world of early monasticism, many traditions of the Mediterranean were transferred to Christian communities on the western fringe of Europe; that of the cemetery fringed with evergreens among them. When cypress proved unequal to the Atlantic gales, the monks of Ireland had to resort to yew as a signifier for places of burial. 'Yew, little yew, you are conspicuous in graveyards' says the mad king Suibhne [5]. The yew beside a chapel or church served to remind its celebrant of death, a grateful reflection for holy men; Columcille spoke to angels beneath the shade of such a tree -

A visionary episode in The Exile of Conall Corc describes a similar scene at the Rock of Cashel in Tipperary: 'I beheld a yew bush on a stone and I perceived a small oratory in front of it and a flagstone before it. Angels were in attendance going up and down from the flagstone' [6]. The vision is nakedly political, and serves to underwrite the ambitions of a yew-dynasty, the Eoganacht of Munster, but it shows that churches with yews were already familiar in the eighth century. The planting of yews was often ascribed to the early saints. The monastery at Iubhar-Chinntrechta, now Newry, was named after 'the yew tree which Patrick himself had planted', and its burning in 1162 was a national outrage. The yew tree of Ciaran at Clonmacnoise was already venerable in 1149, when it was large enough to shelter a flock of sheep in a storm; lightning struck the tree and 113 sheep were killed [7]. Nineteenth-century traditions should be received with caution, but the yew in the cemetery at Glendalough was said to have been planted by St Kevin, while three elm trees at Kilmonin in Co. Offaly had replaced an earlier trio of yews attributed to St Cuimin [8].

Traditions of this kind were evidently current when Gerald of Wales visited Ireland in the 1180s. He tells of the Norman archers billetted at Finglas, Co. Dublin, who cast greedy eyes on the `ash trees and yews and various other kinds of trees' which abbot Kenach and his successors `had formerly planted . . . round the cemetery for the ornament of the church'. The godless invaders cut these up for firewood, but promptly died of plague. Giraldus was struck by the extensive distribution of yew in Ireland. 'You will see them principally in old cemeteries and sacred places, where they were planted in ancient times by the hands of holy men, to give them what ornament and beauty they could' [9]. That some of the trees had grown to be dominating presences is shown by their frequency in placenames - Cell Iubhar, `yew church', is found at six places, and Cill-eo and Killeochaille occur with the same meaning [10].

Irish saints, as pilgrims on this earth, were prepared to find a grave away from their own country: but they wanted to keep up the old funeral customs. Iona, settled by Columcille in 563, is more properly I or Hi, `yew island' [11]. The trees after which it was named must have been deliberately planted - the coast of Argyll is too windswept for them to have grown naturally - and they would have served as a mark of consecration by the saint or his followers. Graveyard yews in Scotland are most common around the southwest coastline and the mouth of the Clyde, suggesting a custom imported by the Irish missionaries. With time, the yews have become proprietary rather than communal signs; they stand beside individual graves, or mark the private burial places of families within the churchyard [12].

Irish customs were also current in Wales. The laws of Howell Dda, which date from c.950, open the section on trees with `A yew of a saint is a pound in value' - twice the worth of an oak, and in marked contrast to the miserable 15 pence quoted for `a yew of a wood' [13]. Evidently the valuation bore no relevance to the worth of the tree, but was intended to protect sacred ground against outrages of the sort carried out at Iubhar-Cinntrechta.

Yew trees appear to have been planted, as at Finglas, around the boundary of the churchyard. The minsters of Esgor and Heullan were anciently 'of celebrity for sheltering yews'. At Llanelly in Brecon, thirteen yews survive out of an original ring of eighteen; Penpont has a larger circle, with thirty-eight trees surviving; Llanfihangel-nant-Melan is ringed by ancient yews [14]. These trees were evidently planted at a time before the circular llan had been replaced by the rectangular churchyard, although the date of this change is itself open to question, and in some cases may be no earlier than the thirteenth century. In Wales, as in Scotland, the yew appears to have assumed the role of living gravestone. At the abbey of Strata Florida, a veteran yew is pointed out as the grave of Dafydd ap Gwilym - an implausible claim, since the tree is 22 feet and so even at the minimum estimate most have been growing before the death of the celebrated poet in the 1380s. The tradition has a mediaeval origin, however, in a mock-elegy on Dafydd written while he was still alive by Gruffydd Gryg in which it is indeed proposed to bury him under a yew [15]. Tradition also continued to link the yew with saints. The churchyard yew of Llanerfyl owes its existence to St Erfyl, who absent-mindedly left her staff stuck upright in the ground overnight, and in the morning found it had sprouted into a young tree [16]. Without making any claims for the reliability of this story, it can be taken as proof of an enduring link between churchyard yews and pilgrim saints.

Exactly the same tale is told at Congresbury on the other side of the Bristol Channel. The stump of a yew which remains in the churchyard was a flourishing tree before 1829, and the Somerset villagers knew it as St Congar's Walking Stick. The saint has been associated with this place since 894 but his life, a dramatic rigmarole in which he features as the errant son of a Byzantine emperor, leaves a wide field for historical inquiries: at least six Congars have been identified in different outposts of the Celtic west [17].

Claims that a statute commanded the planting of yews in 1483, or that Queen Elizabeth ordered them to be grown in churchyards for the benefit of bowyers, have a way of vanishing on close inspection. No primary source has been quoted, either, for the injunction of Charles VII of France that yew should be grown in the churchyards of Normandy to furnish weapons for crossbowmen. Other traditions, that the trees were planted to shade the church, or to keep cattle from poisoning themselves on the foliage, are no more than antiquarian fancy dressed up as folklore [18]. The cutting of yew branches to be borne in procession on Palm Sunday, as a substitute for the liturgically correct but botanically unavailable olive, was a widespread mediaeval custom. But it only represents a versatile use of pre-existent churchyard yews; Palm Sunday processions were a late development, and many plants other than yew were acceptable for use in the ceremony [19].

It is equally hard to find evidence for the modern belief that yew trees were venerated as part of pagan religion. Allen Meredith is convinced that they were; but then he is a visionary, a passionate advocate for the trees, not an impartial judge of their claims. His colleagues Anand Chetan and Diana Brueton have devoted a great deal of their book The Sacred Yew to just this topic. There is a lot about pagan trees and paganism in general; Herne the Hunter, Robin Hood and Hu Gadarn have their turn, together with much other padding of a familiar kind. But actual references to pagan yews are few.

Chetan and Brueton feel that, since the yew is such a remarkable tree, it must have received respect from the earliest times. There is little to support this. The longevity of the tree was known - the ogham letter Idho for `yew' was elliptically described as `oldest tree' or `most beautiful of ancients' [20]. But old or not, the trees were felled without regret. The commentary on Brehon law defines yew as a Chieftain Tree not for its sanctity but on account of `its timber, used for household vessels, breast-plates etc.' Apple and hazel, by contrast, were ritually protected [21]. Yew is so durable a wood that many objects carved in it, both sacred and secular, have survived in the archaeological record. Its use for ogham wands and runestaves therefore bears witness to the sturdiness of its timber and not the enchantment of its name [22].

The shortcomings of pagan literature on this topic do not trouble Chetan and Brueton. It is possible to improve the picture by suggesting that ancient references to apple, ash and oak trees are, in fact, yew; or by identifying Adam of Bremen's account of the evergreen tree at Gamla Uppsala as if it were a yew, despite his unambiguous 'no one knows what kind of a tree it is'. This miraculous tree, capable of bearing seventy-two hanged bodies on its branches, comes from the same storehouse of marvels as the golden chain which girded the adjoining temple, and to inquire too closely into its botany would obscure the real intent of the story [23]. Similarly the Eo Mugna, one of the five sacred trees of Ireland, bore apples and acorns as well as hazel nuts for its fruit: although its name means `yew of Mugna', it is obviously a fairy tree, not an actual specimen of Taxus baccata. Another of the five trees, the Eo Rossa or 'yew of Ross', was said to have grown in Co. Carlow until it was felled by a congregation of timber-hungry saints. That sounds historical: but then we find that the tree, like its four peers, had grown from the three-natured berries of a branch born by the mysterious antediluvian Trefuilngid Tre-eochair [24]. Story-telling of this kind certainly recalls the bile or sacred trees which were honoured in pagan Ireland - but it is not fair to regard the tales as mere echoes from that past. They form a distinct and sophisticated genre of historic fantasy, composed by and for Christians for whom the yew was already associated with the resting places of the holy dead.

The history of the sacred yew can be sketched in outline. It originated in sixth or seventh century Irish monasticism; it was carried over the sea to Strathclyde and Gwynedd as part of the establishment of missionary raths and llans. Protected by law in tenth-century Wales, it was cultivated across the border in the West Country and the marcher lands. So it came to be adopted enthusiastically by builders of churches in southern England, the ecological heartland of the yew, and as a result of the Conquest it was grown on the English-facing coasts of Normandy and Brittany [25]. An interpretation on roughly these lines would match up with the written references, the general trends of insular Christian history, and the ages suggested for existing trees by a series of naturalists from 1831 to 1958. But it runs clean contrary to modern estimates of the longevity of yews.

David Bellamy, following his conversion to Allen Meredith's views, has been issuing certificated claims of age for veteran yews. They hang in churches up and down the land and they make an impressive total; over 130 English churchyard yews are said to be older than the establishment of Christianity in this country. Half a dozen are ascribed a date in the late Bronze Age, while a few are more ancient still. That is a bit much for an archaeologist to swallow. The minimum age for these trees, based on the known growth rates, would date most of them to the high Middle Ages.

Stratigraphy imposes some limits to the ambitious claims of Meredith and Bellamy. A yew which has sprouted on an earthwork cannot be older than the soil on which it grows. A number of the trees found away from churchyards are on hedgebanks or boundaries which seem to be of Anglo-Saxon or later date; there are veterans at Wintershall (29 feet in girth), Acton Burnell Park (25 feet), Aldworth (27 feet), Castle Frome (21 feet) and Chevening (20 feet). Some of these are dated by Meredith to 2000 years (first century AD); their archaeological context suggests that they are only half that age. The so-called Pilgrims' Way through Surrey and Kent runs beside banks created by mediaeval ploughing, and the yews growing on these earthworks are already of venerable proportions [26].

At Knowlton in Dorset there is a line of yews, survivors from an early hedgerow, with an average girth of 25 feet. The trees are growing over one of a series of henge monuments, and this has persuaded Meredith to give them an age of 2500 or 3000 years - postdating the abandonment of the henges, it is true, but still pretty old. However, Knowlton was reoccupied in the seventh century as a focus for pagan Saxon burials, focussed on a dominating barrow towards which the hedgerow is aligned. The trees form part of an Anglo-Saxon network of boundaries and burials across the ancient earthworks, and they in their turn may have influenced the choice of the site for a church in the twelfth century [27].

Further evidence linking the yew with pagan burials comes from Taplow, where the excavators of the rich seventh century barrow unceremoniously dislodged a 21-feet tree from the top of the mound. Here, as at Knowlton, the history of the site continues into the Christian era with a church thirty yards away [28]. Evidently the yew was planted at a time when the barrow was more important than the church, either to act as a grave-tree for the eponymous Taeppa or to mark out the mound as a place of assembly. Until the decline of hundredal jurisdictions in the twelth century, trees were employed as landmarks for moots. A decayed yew stood on a mound at Wormelow Tump until 1855; it had been the moot for one of the Herefordshire hundreds. The hundredal court of Totteridge met under the yew in the churchyard, and the manorial court and fair of Pensale were held under a yew at Langsett. Knowlton itself was the seat of a hundred [29].

But other yews, equal in size and dignity, are found in sites dating from the later Middle Ages. Trees in deerparks have been preserved as part of a landscape fashion; parks flourished in the thirteenth century, and the yews within thems cannot be much older, which means that Meredith's dates for the trees at Kentchurch Court (35 feet), Knowle Park (20 feet) and Waldershare Park (30 feet) -all estimated at 1000-2000 years old - are again more than double the true age. At Langley Park in Buckinghamshire a self-regenerating yew is growing in a moated farmstead site; one at Brackley in Northamptonshire grows in or over a deserted mediaeval village [30]. Estimates of their age should be made accordingly.

This is the crux of the matter. Archaeologically and botanically there is nothing implausible about a date `coeval with the plinth' for many English churchyard yews. But to go further - to claim that more than a hundred churches were built on sites chosen because they adjoined flourishing pagan yew trees - that is something else.

There is little direct archaeological evidence. When the 26-feet yew at Selborne came down in the great storm of 1991, the soil under its roots was excavated and an undisturbed area was found, dating to a time when the tree was nine or ten feet in girth. Comparison with more modern trees of known age suggests that the yew was 200-400 years old at that time. This area was cut by, and therefore earlier than, a coffined burial whose grave fill contained five residual sherds, none of them later than 1600 and one definitely thirteenth or fourteenth century [31]. A tree which was three centuries old in c.1500 would be roughly contemporary with the earliest, twelfth century, phase of the church. A similar conclusion can be reached by an estimate of size alone; a growth rate of one foot in 30 years up to the first recorded measurement (23 feet in 1778) would suggest that the tree was planted in the eleventh century. Meredith's estimate of 1400 years (sixth century), with all that it implies for the history of the site, is not necessary.

An archaeological case has also been made for the great age of the yew at Tandridge in Surrey. Very tall, 35 feet in girth, and grotesquely hollowed within, it stands by the west wall of the nave. We are assured that within the Saxon crypt stone vaulting can be seen bridging the roots of the tree. This, if true, would vindicate Meredith's claims with a vengeance: for roots grow pari passu with trunks, and if these roots were equal to their present size a thousand years ago, then the tree must have been immense even then. On inquiry, however, I find that Tandridge church has no Saxon phase nor any crypt, and that local opinion was as puzzled by the story of the root as I was [32].

Almost every old yew can be seen to harmonise with the plan of the church for which it was planted. It will stand overshadowing the entrance path to the church porch, normally on the south side; where convenience has dictated a porch to the north, the yew is there also. Sometimes there are two trees, one beside the main funeral path, the other by a minor entrance. As Vaughan Cornish observes, this implies that the church was laid out first and the yews came afterwards. Common sense would suggest this as the general rule. At Dunsfold the church stands on the edge of a bluff overlooking the river Arun, in a Wealden parish of dispersed and secondary settlement [33]. Below the path as it turns to enter the church stands a twisty, hollow yew 24 feet in girth. Meredith in his usual way dates it to 1500 years (fifth century). In which case, you wonder, why does it happen to stand just below the crest of a hill on which a thirteenth-century church was to be built, and opposite its door?

It is not always unreasonable to suppose that churches have been built on pagan sites, but one would like to see some evidence offered in support. At Fortingall in Perthshire two sections remain from an immense yew which, when intact, must have measured 56 feet in girth. At even the most conservative estimate this tree must be older than the establishment of Christianity in these islands; and although it has been subject to various ritual indignities, including the lighting of Beltane fires against it and the procession of funerals through its trunk, the tree has obviously been cared for over the centuries. Significantly the nearby placename Duneaves is tigh-neimhid, 'the house of the sacred grove', and a nearby village has the reputation of being the true centre of Scotland [34]. Here it is easy to believe that the yew was originally tended as an equivalent to the Irish bile or tribal tree, and was afterwards adapted as part of the environment of a missionary kill during the Christianisation of Dalriada.

Things were different in southern England. Most of the parish churches with which we are dealing were established long after the extirpation of paganism, and many of them serve communities which were themselves secondary settlements. A village with a name like Ashtead is likely to have come into being through woodland clearance; in fact the church here is known to have been built as a dependent chapelry of Leatherhead in 1120, and estimates of age for its 23 feet yew tree must be adjusted accordingly [35].

Some churches, and their yews, can be dated by inference. Lytchett Matravers is one of several parishes in south-eastern Dorset formed in the tenth century by breaking up the parochia of a local minster - in this case, Sturminster Marshall [36]. Nonetheless its yew, 23 feet in girth, is dated by Meredith at 1600 years (fourth century). As before, his estimate of age appears to be double that suggested by the historical context. The same results obtain when churches have been dated archaeologically. At Sydling St Nicholas excavation showed the first phase of the church to be as late as the thirteenth century, thereby fixing a date for its 14 feet yew [37].

There are great problems in proving that any given church is the earliest building standing on its site. There may have been a timber original; there may even have been a pagan predecessor. But the case is much clearer with monasteries, which were built at known dates on greenfield sites. They, too, have their yew trees.Waverley Abbey, founded in 1128, is neighbour to a yew 21 feet in girth; Fountains Abbey, in 1132, is flanked by veteran yews of 22 feet; next comes Dryburgh in 1136, with a 12 feet tree; Ankerwyke Priory, founded in 1160, adjoins a 31 feet tree; Strata Florida, founded 1184, as we have seen has one of 22 feet; at Muckross Abbey, of 1440, the tree is 12 feet and stands in the centre of the cloister, obviously a deliberate planting [38]. These trees belong to the last phase in the cultural history of the sacred yew, its adoption by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. The tree at Dryburgh - the northernmost of this group - has grown slowly, while that at Ankerwyke, in the rich floodplain of the Thames, has flourished. Generally, however, the dimensions of the yews support the rule of thumb with which we began, of growth at a rate of one foot in 30 years with a five-feet margin of error. It is hardly necessary to add that Meredith's estimates for the dates of these trees make them, yet again, twice as old as the buildings which they were in fact planted to embellish.

I sometimes wonder whether this search for pagan antecedents does not betray a subconscious resentment against the Christian tradition. The annals of geomantic research are full of attempts to marginalise or explain away the achievements of the Church, as if sacredness and Christianity were somehow at variance with one another. In Allen Meredith's case this zeal for pagan origins has persuaded him that Magna Carta was signed, not on the accepted site of Runnymede, but at Ankerwyke under the shelter of an age-old yew, the axis mundi of a prechristian cult. The tree itself has sent him dreams of a coronation ceremony, and messages about the threat to its existence (a planned golf course). Well, if your life was in danger, wouldn't you be prepared to glamourise your origins a little? [39].

In 1992 David Bellamy led a meeting which proposed - 777 years after the original event - a new Great Charter, a revised ecological version granting rights of a somewhat non-specific nature to all living creatures on the earth. It was a public relations exercise, and the fact that the signatories were convinced of a prechristian origin for the twelfth-century tree under which they met is only one of the many absurdities involved. But it would be short-sighted of a mere antiquarian to heckle from the sidelines. What are a few centuries here and there when the neo-pagan salvation of the planet is in question? Yet I feel that the truth should also count for something.

The Yew, Taxus baccata, is an ancient tree species that has survived since before the Ice Age and as such as been revered and used by humankind throughout the ages. All races of the Northern Hemisphere, especially the Celts, the Greeks, the Romans and the North American Indians, have a right and powerful understanding of this unusual and remarkable tree. Because of its longevity and its unique way of growing new trunks from within the original root bole, it has now been estimated that some English Yews are as much as 4,000 years old, their presence spanning ages of time and history. No wonder the Yew is associated with immortality, renewal, regeneration, everlasting life, rebirth, transformation and access to the Otherworld and our ancestors.

There are about 10 different species of Yew in the northern temperate zones of Asia, Asia Minor, India, Europe, North Africa and North America. They are all thought to have descended from Paleotaxus rediviva, which was found imprinted on a Triassic era fossils laid down more than 200,000,000 years ago. Recently, more fossils of the Yew have been found from the Jurassic era, 140,000,000 years ago. So the Yew has managed to survive the great climatic changes of our planet, adapting and finding ways to live longer than most species alive today. According to pollen counts taken from peat bogs of Europe, the Yew trees grew in greater abundance at the time of the Ice Age than they do now. As the glaciers receded northwards, the great forests of Europe contained up to 80% of Yew trees, and since these times have been in continuous decline.

Ancient Yew wood tools and implements can be found in museums throughout Europe. Because it is a slow-growing tree, it has a tight-grained wood, tough and resilient, used in the past for spears, spikes, staves, small hunting bows and eventually the famous longbows of the Middle Ages. The arrows were tipped with poison made from the Yew. The entire tree is poisonous - wood, bark, needles and seed. The only part which isn't is the fleshy part of the seed. Be aware of the dangerous aspects of the Yew if you handle the tree or work with the wood. It is one of the reasons why it is known as the death tree.

The Yew is sacred to Hecate, and the Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess; both are guardians of the Underworld, death and the afterlife. A lot of our ancient Yews are found in churchyards but there is no doubt that they were there before the churches were built. Many churches and churchyards once stood in a circle of Yews, which were probably a legacy of the Druids' sacred groves. At Amesbury in Wiltshire, there are 14 Yews in a churchyard and 18 at Bradford-on-Avon. All are growing on blind springs. The 99 Yews in a churchyard at Painswick in Gloucestershire were also found to be on nodes or springs. It seems likely that the Yews were planted with the intention of marking and protecting these powerful spots. A new system of dating Yews suggests that some of our most ancient and protected Yews are 4,000 years old and not 1,500 years old as previously thought.

The Yew is considered to be the most potent tree for protection against evil, a means of connecting to your ancestors, a bringer of dreams and otherworld journeys and a symbol of the old magic. In hot weather it gives off a resinous vapour which shamans inhaled to gain visions. Yew wood was regarded as especially magical to the Celts, due to its connection with the dead and the ancestors which were deeply respected. Archaeologists have recently found well-preserved Yew wood carvings at ancient sites of springs and wells which were probably votive offerings. Yew would have been idea for this purpose, as it was already magically associated with the Goddess and the Gods. It was the most durable wood of the European forest, and more practically it is said to sink as is a dense and heavy wood. It is fairly easy to carve and the most beautiful of our native woods, a deep golden orange, with a deep red core which polishes up well. It was used in the past for making wheels and cogs, spoons, handles, bowls and any turned items, and the body of the lute, but it is a perfect wood to use for sacred carvings. It should be noted, though, that even the dust produced from sanding Yew wood is poisonous, and great care should be taken where you work and how you work.

The Yew tree is the last of the 20 trees in the Tree Ogham, a Celtic system in which the Druids encoded their wisdom. Each spiritual insight is represented by a tree, the first letter of which creates an alphabet system. Each letter is written as a line on, or crossing, a central stemline. These symbols can be found on the edges of some standing stones in Ireland and Wales, but they were probably, for magical and communication purposes, carved on staves of Yew. It was used as a silent communication system by the Druids, and is recorded in some medieval manuscripts. The place of Yew, or Idho, I, was at the base of the Mercury finger (the little finger) at the line which separates it from the palm. The connection of the Mercury finger with the Yew is made by Mercury's conducting of souls to the place presided over by the death Goddess, Hecate, alias Maia, this mother, to who the Yew was sacred. The Ogham symbol could also be communicated silently by using the shin bone as the central stemline and laying five fingers horizontally across it.

The Yew tree, or Yew wood, the Tree ogham Idho, is the link to spiritual guidance through your ancestors, guides and guardians in the Otherworld. The Yew is here to remind us that there are other levels of existence beyond this material plane. By understanding the illusionary nature of the life we have created for ourselves, we can live our lives more consciously. Often death is fraught with a sense of loss, but the Yew can teach us to see death as a form of transformation and that it is never final.

The knowledge we gain from the Yew makes it an extremely important tree for healing. It can help us overcome our fear of our own death and, by freeing us from this fear, bring us a greater stillness in our lives. Death heralds the ending of something. It may be a physical death, or the death of our old selves, an old way of life or an old way of looking at things. Each end, each death, is a new beginning, hope, future and transformation. Sometimes things need to end or die before the new can begin, and understanding rebirth always requires seeing beyond our limitations.

The Yew can be used to assist Otherworld journeys and to increase openness of communication with the Otherworld, through an increased ability to understand and receive the messages which are being given to us by our guides and helpers. By opening ourselves to intuitively interpreting these messages, and trusting our intuitions to act on what we receive, we can make some real progress as the wheel turns and the death of one situation heralds the birth of another.

Magically the Yew is used for summoning spirits and any Otherworld communication. It is linked to Samhain, when entry to the Otherworld is easiest, dreams are most potent and access to the ancestors is most possible. The Yew is linked to the runes yr and eolh, both ruled by Jupiter and the positive benefits of transformation. According to a modern encyclopaedia of magical herbs, the Yew is feminine, its element is water and its planet is Saturn. However it seems to me that Pluto would be a much more appropriate planet as it is the planet of death and change, transformation and rebirth. The Yew also connects through Samhain and the water element, to Scorpio, ruled by Pluto.

Because the Yew is poisonous, there re no herbal remedies, although it was sometimes called the forbidden tree as it was used to stimulate abortions. In the north, the Yew was used for dowsing to find lost property (enlisting the help of the ancestors?). The seeker held a Yew branch in front of him or her which led them to the goods, and turned his hand when he was near them. A strange belief in the north of Scotland concerning the Yew was that a person, when grasping a branch of Yew in the left hand, may speak to anyone he pleases without that person being able to hear, even though everyone else present can. This may have been useful if someone wished to prejudice the clan against a chief without receiving punishment for his insults.

Yew has long been part of funerary customs, which may vary from country to country and district to district. They mainly involve carrying sprigs of Yew which are either thrown in the grave under the body or of being thrown in on top of the coffin. In Suffolk it was considered unlucky if some Yew came into the house with the Christmas Eve decorations and a sure sign that someone in the family would die before the year was out. In Derbyshire, however, care was taken to include the Yew in the evergreens brought into the house at Christmas, although it was on no account to be taken from the churchyard, and to be used specifically as part of the decorations around the window. Yew is also put around the well-dressing pictures, a tradition of making pictures from petals and placing these by the old wells and springs, which is still practised in Derbyshire today.

With so much of our folklore there seems to be many layers of beliefs, superstitions and fears, which are usually the result of Christian overlay. The Yew, with its ability to span the ages, seems to have sustained its intrinsic meaning of death and rebirth from the time of early man, though Celtic and Druidic teachings and the Christian church, to the Aquarian age. Perhaps it is because it has stood in the same spot, on the same sacred power point, for generations of human lives.

So many of the ancient Yew trees we have in our country are protected by the churchyard, and reports of their great girths, and therefore great ages, are documented throughout historical texts. In the past they were used as landmarks, because of their size and longevity, and their dark branches would make them stand out in the landscape. Yew groves planted by the Druids were common by ancient ways, on sacred sites, hilltops, ridgeways and burial grounds. Tribal leaders were buried beneath Yew trees, in the sure belief that their knowledge and wisdom would be joined with the Dryad of the Yew and therefore still be accessible to the tribe for generations to come.

So many of these ancient documented trees have gone now, but in recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in the Yew, and there are several books available now which are still with us. It is possible to make a pilgrimage to visit these magnificent trees and touch the awesome connection to ages long gone. A friend of mine's personal "crusade" is Yew trees, and planting as many as possible along the great Michael and Mary leylines which run from St Michael's Mount in Cornwall, up through Glastonbury, Avebury, Bury St Edmunds and ending at Hopton on the Norfolk coast. If any one knows of a protected spot where he could plant a Yew along this line, I will pass your name and number on to him if you write to me.1

Yew trees can be propagated through cuttings, seed, graftings or layering. It is also possible to find small trees growing near bigger trees, which transplant well. They prefer a moist, fertile, sandy loam soil, but will grow well in most soils except water-logged ground or sticky wet clay. They also grow well on chalk. They resist pollution and can flourish in the shade of taller trees, but little will grow in the shade they themselves cast.

Yew has been found to be beneficial in propagating other species. Cuttings soaked in an infusion of crushed Yew and water produce quicker and healthier root growth, though I have not tried it myself. Cuttings of Yew taken from lateral branches generally produce shrub-like plants, while those from erect topward branches are more likely to produce a tree.

The Pacific Yew of North America has been found to have the most taxol in its bark, but the bark is only 1/8th of an inch thick. A 200-year old tree with a diameter of 10 inches will yield 6lbs of bark, which in turn will produce 1/5th of a gram of taxol. The average amount to treat one patient is 2 grams, so clearly the problem of supply would be impossible and could result in the Yew becoming extinct. Although they have tried, scientists have not been able to make a synthetic version of taxol. Now researchers are trying to find ways of extracting the taxol from the twigs and needles. Yew tree forests as a sustainable resource could be planted. Branch trimming would probably stimulate growth of foliage and a continuous and potentially increasing supply of raw material. Experiments are being made with varieties which grow faster and may produce higher levels of taxol. A sustainable solution has to be found in order for this potential to become a reality. Already scientists in America have destroyed thousands of Yew trees in their research programme, and now the English Yew is being used for this valuable research.

In Britain, interest in the Yew tree over the last 10 years has raised awareness of these wonderful trees. We have about 250 ancient Yews which live very closely to humankind in our churchyards, and hopefully this contact with the ancient wise Dryads will help to protect the Yews worldwide, as they have offered their protection to us. Communication with trees is a very real phenomena to those who are open to receive. A huge Yew planting programme began in Britain in 1996 led by David Bellamy, encouraging the churches and villages to replant the Yew trees again.

Our ancestors revered the Yew above all other trees. It has always been held sacred and understood as a link with death and rebirth. It was used by early man for making weapons, tools of death, and now thousands of years later it is providing a possibility of averting death for cancer patients. It is a powerful reconnection to humankind for this tree when you consider that each person with cancer has to face their own death, whether they are cured or not. One of the most valuable abilities of the Yew is to provide the opportunity for people to turn and face death, to progress beyond fear to a communication wtih what is beyond our reality, which will bring understanding, clear insight, enriched by a deeper experience of life.

The New York Stock Exchange traces its beginnings to 1792, when a group of New York City stock dealers and traders agreed to funnel business to each other. They called their agreement the Buttonwood Agreement after the buttonwood tree under which they met to trade. New York City brokers established a formal organization, the New York Stock and Exchange Board, in 1817. This group changed its name to the New York Stock Exchange in 1863.

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