When I cycle through Frankfurt's green spaces, I sometimes pass a grove with a few dozen yew trees.
Strangely enough, I only pay attention to its dark green in the mornings, at other times the other cyclists, geese, passers-by, scooter rowdies and wandering toddlers distract me too much, whom I have to avoid.
But I am always fascinated by the evergreen trees from the
Taxaceae
family
, which comprises six genera.
And right now, when its fruits curl bright red between soft, soft needles, I have to think how poisonous yew trees are, and all parts of the plant;
The only exceptions are pollen and the fleshy seed coat, called arillus.
Sonja Kastilan
Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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The fruit is not a berry, and it is said that the sweet mass can be used to cook jam, provided the seeds are carefully removed.
I refrain from this self-experiment and prefer to leave the harvest to the birds, who in this way ensure that it spreads, because the yew trees in Germany have long since ceased to thrive that lush.
In Europe it is with
Taxus baccata
Only one of the around 35 family members is native, and several millennia before the poison of the yew trees was discovered for cancer therapy, used as a deadly weapon or used in Roman mythology, their durable wood found attention, it was used for pile dwellings or medieval longbows , because it was not only hard, heavy and durable, but also flexible and elastic.
Even Ötzi carried a pole about 1.80 meters long on his last mountain tour around 5300 years ago, apparently a blank from which he wanted to make an arch of the right thickness and size;
in his quiver there were arrows and a string made of elastic animal tendons when hikers discovered his ice mummy on September 19 thirty years ago in the Ötztal Alps.
For hunting forest elephants
Also famous is the almost 2.40 meter long "Lance von Lehringen", which was excavated in 1948 near Verden in Lower Saxony. The tip was stuck in the skeleton of a forest elephant, which Neanderthals presumably captured around 120,000 years ago and dismantled on the spot. Under the weight of the elephant that was hit, its spear broke into eleven parts, the wood of which certainly came from a yew tree: under the microscope, spiral-shaped thickening of the cell wall can be seen in thin, colored sections that clearly distinguish it from spruce, larch, oak or beech. In some places, however, the latter is challenging the coveted place in the sun in the German forest.
Yew trees are considered to be extremely shade-tolerant, but their seedlings have a hard time under a thick canopy of beech leaves. In the Rhön, people therefore had to intervene several times and create light conditions for a coppice forest, for example, in order to prevent the 368 up to 800-year-old yew trees in the Thuringian “Ibengarten” from running out of offspring. Naturalists and foresters began with protection and special care here in the 19th century, today the 58 hectares on Neuberg belong to the Rhön Biosphere Reserve. And there you can hike in the footsteps of the legendary Rhönpaulus, a shepherd servant, deserter and poacher who found shelter in a cave there. The story begins in 1736 and has everything a real robber's pistol needs: born out of wedlock, orphaned at an early age; wounded in the Seven Years War,he gets by with odd jobs, smuggling and theft - spares the needy, avoids violence. His life came to an end in 1780, and an oak tree was involved in this. In turn, I like the yew tree best in its role as a cancer therapeutic, and this story began in 1962 with an American botanist when he collected the bark from 200 trees.