The Craigends Yew

This yew has reproduced itself sideways. Its branches grow downward rather than up, and where they touch the soil they root and send up new vertical stems — a process called layering. The clones that result are genetically identical to the parent, and as the original trunk hollows and dies back, they carry on. What began as one tree is now a grove whose crown has reached a circumference of about a hundred metres.

It grows beside the River Gryffe, in what were the grounds of the Craigends Estate at Houston in Renfrewshire, at grid reference NS4199566134. Estimates put its age at between 500 and 700 years, which would place its beginning somewhere between about 1300 and 1500, and make it one of the largest and oldest heritage layering yews in Scotland. The Ancient Tree Inventory holds it as tree number 31486. The parent trunk has a girth of 8.86 metres measured 30 centimetres from the ground, and the grove has now thrown out a second row of layered stems beyond the first.

The tree carries a small ecosystem of its own. Ferns, ivy, liverworts, lichens and mosses grow on it, encouraged by the humidity trapped beneath an evergreen canopy and supplemented by occasional flooding from the river. Its condition is what one would expect of a tree of this age and habit: a hollowing trunk, water pockets in the branch angles, holes in the main stem, decaying branches in the crown, rotting wood on the ground. Dormant buds along the horizontal branches are breaking into new vertical growth, so the grove is still extending.

The estate around it has not fared as well. In 1479 the lands of Craigends were granted to William Cuninghame, second son of the first Earl of Glencairn, and this branch of the family held them into the twentieth century. An 1818 account describes the estate as adorned with pleasant orchards and gardens, the seat of the ancient family, and it has been suggested that the yew was among the Cuninghames’ earliest plantings. The last laird, John Charles Cuninghame, died in 1917. His widow held the estate until 1958, a nephew sold it to the developers Taylor Woodrow, the mansion house was demolished in 1971, and by 1973 housing was going up in the grounds.

The grove survived all of that, though not untouched — it suffered a degree of vandalism before a conservation programme in 2018 removed several trees from within it to reduce shading and cleared the surrounding scrub. It now has room to expand on two sides, being hemmed in to the east by a housing estate fence and to the north by the river. It lies just off a public footpath, and can also be seen from the path through the park on the opposite bank. In 2016 it was shortlisted for Scotland’s Tree of the Year by the Woodland Trust.