Yews and Bows Partly as the result of an excellent
little book on the tree by Dr. Cornish (whose brother was once well known as a naturalist to readers of The Spectator); the question has arisen why yew trees were planted in church- yards. I have long felt that the theory they were planted for providing bows was absurd. In the first place you couldn't make a bow out of any form of branch-pruning, unless the branch were immense, and there is no evidence whatever, so far as I have heard, that these churchyard yews were mauled. The long bow needed old wood, only to be found in the right mixture of strength and elasticity in the trunk. The tree is in the tradition of mourning weeds, and was once almost the only British tree with evergreen foliage. Its length of life also suggested it as a symbol of eternity. In one of the loveliest villages I know—in Herefordshire— yews were planted many hundred years ago as a hedge, and the planters did, not make the almost universal mistake of our garden-designers of planting the bushes in close juxtaposition.
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