Yew Berries

Yew berries, Taxus baccata, on Hayes Common, 17 September 2011.

Yew berries are poisonous, we are told as children, and that is partly true. The fleshy red part is sweet and good, though not to everyone's taste. It is the bitter seeds at the centre that can kill.

These berries are not constructed like an ordinary fruit. Each one is a modified cone, and the red fleshy part is technically an aril, an organ which can be as different as the edible parts of a pomegranate or the fibres in a cotton boll.

Some people are known to eat yew berries as a dare, spitting out the pips. In fact they are nutritious. Foxes eat them too, licking them up off the ground where they fall in large numbers. This does not seem to suit their digestive systems; the resulting scat looks distinctly uncomfortable.

Fox scat, Vulpes vulpes, containing yew berries, Taxus baccata.
20 September 2011.

The photo on the left was taken on a very thinly attended walk at High Elms Country Park on 20th September. I was the only one to turn up, but the ranger, Nick Hopkins, still showed me a few of the things he had prepared. Finding the fox scat was fortuitous.

You can see the red colouration, and the seeds, which have passed through untouched. Presumably it was their gelatinous surroundings that caused this result.

Yew branches grow thickly and block out the light. For the photo above, I had to use a flash. Below, however, is one I took more than a decade ago in Kelsey Park, when I saw the sunlight shining through the berries, making them look very festive.

Yew berries in Kelsey Park.