OVER the last few weeks I have been discovering more and more about the folklore of British plants.

It is amazing how often you see yew trees growing in churchyards.

Have you ever wondered why this should be?

To understand the importance of the yew we need to go back in time and long before Christ to the Scandinavian god called Ull.

This god is still part of our life today and is celebrated in the name of Ullswater Lake and the town of Ulverston both in Cumbria.

The god Ull was a warrior who made bows and skis.

There was, so legend goes, a sacred tree called Yggdrasil which was known as the world tree and which was almost certainly a yew.

There is some confusion as to whether the sacred tree might have been an ash but in Scandinavia the yew is more common than the ash.

One religion tends to borrow traditions from another and there are two suggestions explaining why yew trees are planted in churchyards.

One is to provide the wood to make bows when danger threatened.

The idea is that the church bells ring out a warning and the people hurry to the priest and begin to make their weapons. This does not seem to make sense to me because once the danger warning sounds it is a bit late to start making a bow.

The best explanation I think is that when Christian missionaries began to convert people who followed the old religion they found the tradition associated with the sacred tree difficult to dislodge.

The Christians therefore held services beneath the shelter of the yew.

They then erected a cross near the tree and gradually built a church on the same site.

Whalley shows this evolution perfectly. First came the yew trees which still grow in the churchyard; then came the preaching crosses and finally the church.

Yew trees can live a thousand years and are also unusual in the sense that the red berries can fall into the hollow of another tree and then germinate inside the trunk, a new tree growing out of the old.

Other churches also have yew trees now providing shade for the gravestones and there is a fine example of this at Chipping.

In the old testament book of Job (chapter 14) there is a poem:

There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down.

That it will sprout again,

and that the tender branch thereof will not cease

Though the root thereof were old in the earth

and the stock thereof die in the ground:

yet though the scent of water it will bud,

and bring forth boughs like a plant.

A few years ago I visited one of the most famous yew trees in Britain. It is at Selborne, in Hampshire.

It was the sight of this ancient yew which persuaded the Rev Gilbert White to begin writing a diary. Because of this diary Gilbert White is regarded as the father of British natural history. Only the stump now remains of the famous old yew but it is being preserved for all time.

Care must be taken by those who study the yew because both the red fruits and the leaves are poisonous. The magnificent mansion which is now Stonyhurst College at Hurst Green was once the home of the Shireburn family. When the young heir died because of eating yew berries in 1702 the whole future of the influential family was destroyed in the space of one day.