Pacific yew seeds now available

The western coast of Canada is a cool, foggy and rainy climate that makes an excellent environment for a specific species of yew, the Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia). Distributed widely across the British Columbia coastal regions as well as parts of the interior, it is a common but easy to overlook species of conifer native to Canada.

Unlike other giant trees of British Columbia like Douglas-fir, Western recedar, or Sitka spruce, Pacific yew is rarely over 15-20m in height and grows slowly, preferring shade and rich moist soils. Its long branches and brown flaky bark with purple-red tints contribute to an interesting form and make it a very nice ornamental tree. The cones are actually bright red berry-like cups called arils that include one single seed.  

It is known that the yew tree generally possesses toxicity when it comes to being ingested by humans or animals. That's true of the leaves, bark, roots and seed but surprisingly the red fleshy berry-like aril contains low amounts of toxin compared to the rest of the tree. 

Some compounds produced in the tree such as Paclitaxel have been used as chemotherapy drugs thus making the tree very useful in medicine. Harvesting the tree for this purpose made an impact on the population numbers but modern methods of synthetic chemistry have been able to reduce the need for extracting natural compounds from trees. 

We are now excited to announce we have in stock a limited quantity of seeds for Pacific yew: https://treeseeds.ca/collections/tree-seeds/products/tree-seed-pacific-yew

Order while supplies last!