Yew lookin at me?

All you have to do to have a good time is find someone who knows what they are talking about and let them talk. My contemporaries are the sort of people who find people. We got the man who knows everything about the garden where we spent the morning - including not just the detail of the current scientific significance, but minutiae about the bureaucracy and institutional politics of its foundation, 400 years ago and development ever since

It was once forced to fund itself by growing crops for sale in the market square - improbably, these included pomegranates, grown against a wall, without the aid of a glasshouse. Glasshouses were eventually erected to grow bananas - a hand of which is part of the annual rent paid to the college that owns the land. A warm water tank, installed in the 19th century to join the race to produce the first Brazilian water lily flower, had the unintended consequence of creating a malaria outbreak. The solution was to introduce fish to eat the mosquito larvae, and the fish are still there. And so on

What could be more familiar than a yew tree? Yews, we learned, (just like oaks four or five centuries later) were once a matter of national security. Yew wood makes the best longbows, especially the wood at the junction betewen the sapwood and the heartwood, which creates a natural laminate - one half good under compression, one under tension. During the One Hundred Years War, the demand for yews became so great that the national stock became depleted - we had to import yew timber. The longbows of Agincourt were fashioned from French yew!

A last snippet: Yews are well-known as an example of a dioecious tree - one that occurs in male or female form, and does not have both male and female flowers on the same tree (unlike, say, hazel). But I never knew they can change sex!! It is well established and evidenced that a 'male' tree can switch to producing only female flowers and then, some years or decades later, switch back again. The reasons and causes are not well understood!

And the sun shone, and the flowers were pretty, and the colours wonderful. A lot of goodwill was generated