Yew

Yew (Taxus baccata), a gymnospermous tree of an isolated character, forming the type of the order Taxaceae. It is a native of most temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, including Britain, where many aged specimens linger in churchyards. Its wood is a deep-brown, elastic, durable, fine-grained, and hard, the latter characters being the results of its extreme slowness of growth, which is such that some of the trees above mentioned are probably over 2,000 years old.