Photo: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Yew

Taxus baccata

Poisonous

Every part but the red flesh of the berry stops the heart, often with no warning symptoms at all.

Educational content, not medical or professional advice. In an emergency call your local emergency number (112 in Europe) first. Never eat a wild plant or mushroom because of a website or photo.

⚠️ Suspected swallowing of needles, bark, wood or chewed seeds is a serious emergency even if the person seems well, because collapse can be sudden and late. Call 112, or the CIAV poison line in Portugal, or your own country's poison service, at once.

⚠️ Take a sprig or a photograph with you.

⚠️ Do not induce vomiting unless a professional tells you to. There is no antidote and hospital monitoring is the treatment.

⚠️ Dust and sap can irritate skin and eyes when clipping. Wear gloves and eye protection.

⚠️ Children eat the red berries. Horses, cattle, sheep, goats and rabbits die from browsing yew or from clippings thrown over a fence, and a mouthful can kill a horse.

⚠️ Never dump hedge clippings anywhere an animal can reach them, and never burn them near people.

Confused with

Fir, spruce and pine needles gathered for tea ☠️

Danger: Taxine alkaloids cause a chaotic then failing heartbeat. Collapse can come suddenly with few earlier symptoms, sometimes hours after eating, and there is no antidote. A handful of needles has killed adults.

How to tell: Turn a needle over. Edible conifer needles for tea, such as pine, have needles in bundles of two to five held by a papery sheath, and fir has two bright chalk-white stripes on the underside. Yew needles come singly in two flat rows, with a dull pale green underside and no white stripes. No white stripes and no bundle means do not brew it.

Red berries mistaken for a fruit ☠️

Danger: The red flesh alone is harmless, but the seed inside it is lethal, and children swallow both. Chewed seeds kill.

How to tell: A yew aril is an open-ended red cup with a hard dark seed visible at the tip, growing on an evergreen with flat needles. No edible berry looks like that. Teach children that red berries on a needle tree are never food.

Leaves

Flat needles 1 to 3 cm long and 2 to 3 mm wide, dark glossy green above, paler matt green beneath with two dull bands and no bright white stripes, soft-pointed not sharp, arranged in two flat rows either side of the twig like a feather.

Flowers

No true flowers. Small pale male cones shed clouds of pollen in late winter. Female trees carry a single hard dark seed sitting in a soft bright red open-ended cup called an aril, like a little red olive with the seed showing at the end.

Stem

Reddish-brown bark that flakes in thin papery scales, and green twigs. The wood, the bark, the needles and the seed are all poisonous, fresh or dried.

Smell or taste

Crushed needles smell faintly resinous and bitter. The red aril flesh is sweet, which is why children eat the berries whole and swallow the deadly seed. Never taste any part.

Habitat

Churchyards, old gardens, hedges, limestone woodland, mountain slopes and formal planting. Widespread in Portugal in gardens and cemeteries, native in the Serra da Estrela and northern mountains.

Preparation

There is no preparation that makes yew safe. Drying does not reduce the toxin, and dried clippings are actually the classic cause of livestock deaths. Never make needle tea, never use the wood for skewers, spits or cooking fuel, and never use the bark for anything internal.

Traditional use

Yew bark and needles are the origin of paclitaxel and docetaxel, real chemotherapy drugs. Those compounds are semi-synthesised, purified and dosed by the milligram in hospital under laboratory control. The raw plant is simply a heart poison. Any attempt to extract or dose it at home is lethal.

Harvest rule

Nothing is harvested from yew for food or medicine. When clipping, wear gloves and eye protection, sheet up the clippings and take every scrap to a green waste facility. Never leave clippings in or near a paddock, field edge or poultry run, and never burn them where people are standing. Old churchyard and veteran yews are often legally protected and thousands of years of growth sit in some of them, so get permission before cutting anything on old trees.

Teixo (PT); yew, English yew (EN)