AGEING IS NOT SO FREE AND TREE-SY

SOME of the ancient trees in these islands are probably not as old as previously thought, treeageing experts have suggested.

A series of studies using new techniques have demonstrated that normal girth measurements can seriously overestimate the age of a tree. Thus the Fortingall Yew in a churchyard of in Perthshire, Scotland is probably not 5,000 years old as popularly believed.

According to local legend, Pontius Pilate was born in its shade and played there as a child. (That’s probably not true either.)

Experts aren’t sure which tree is the oldest in Ireland. But it could be the Silken Thomas yew in Maynooth, which is about 800 years old. Legend has it that Silken Thomas, the pretender to the English throne, played a lute under the boughs of the tree the night before he surrendered to King Henry VIII.

But there’s no argument about the age of the world’s first Irish yew. This is the Florence Court Yew, from which the tree familiar in graveyards throughout the world was propagated. Every Irish yew tree in the world came from this original plant. Grown from a a seedling circa 1750, it can be found lurking unassumingly near the main house in Florence Court, Co Fermanagh.

I was visiting a botanical garden once in the North — usual sort of thing: quick look at the hardy annuals, then into the café for cake. Then I spied none other than a Bastard Service tree — it was helpfully labelled as such. Google it and you’ll find it’s a hybrid known as a Sorbus X thuringiaca — in other words a cross between a whitebeam and a rowan. But no eponymous experience for me in Co Down. The service in the café was exemplary.