The Tree of the Cross

Spending the first half of my life in the Chilterns, in southern England’s chalk country, I grew up with yews. Not churchyard trees, but the bristly, mahogany-trunked nonconformists of the downs and beechwoods. They hunch among the grey-trunked beeches like dark Jack-in-the-Greens. Their seedlings, planted by thrushes, bristle impertinently on the hallowed chalk turf. Sometimes they grow into mature trees, but they never look old. They’re short and stocky. Their trunks are nondescript. Every gale and lopped branch and suggestion of rot leaves its mark on old oaks and beeches, in extravagant bosses and flares of muscled lignin. But yews look impermeable, islands of mute shadow in the woods.