# Yew (Taxus baccata)

**Taxus**

**Known today as.** *Taxus baccata*.

Kind: Plant  
Poisoning: Cardiac glycoside poisoning (https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/poisons/cardiac-glycoside)  
Deadly: yes

> **Deadly.** Leaves, bark, and seeds are deadly; only the red flesh around the seed is not.

## What was it used for?

None, save as a poison; its wood made the longbow.

## What does modern science say?

Its taxines stop the heart. From the bark of the Pacific yew came paclitaxel (Taxol), and from European yew needles docetaxel, both drugs against cancer.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **taxine B**: 
- **paclitaxel**: in the Pacific yew; traces in the European

**Mechanism.** The taxine alkaloids block the sodium and calcium channels of the heart. Paclitaxel binds tubulin; it is the cancer drug, not the poison.

**Dose.** Fifty to a hundred grams of the needles; death within hours by arrhythmia, often with no warning.

**Standing.** Paclitaxel, from the yew, is a cancer drug on the WHO list; the tree itself has no medicinal use.

## What lore surrounds it?

Planted in English churchyards, often older than the church, a tree of death and of everlasting life.

The saying that some churchyard yews are older than their churches is no exaggeration: the Fortingall Yew, in a Perthshire churchyard, is estimated by Forestry and Land Scotland at up to five thousand years old, among the oldest living things in Europe, and long outlived the local legend, now dismissed, that Pontius Pilate played in its shade as a boy.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Caesar.** Records that Catuvolcus, king of the Eburones, took his own life with yew.

## Sources

- Caesar, *The Gallic War* VI.
- Wikipedia, “Fortingall Yew.”
- Nelson, L. S., et al. (2007). *Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants*.

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*Yew.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/yew

Historical description, not medical advice.