Yews at Kingley Vale

Tennyson saw the yew trees exploding at Kingley Vale. I wonder what date he witnessed this phenomena back in Queen Victoria’s reign? For decades, I reckoned the date for the great pollen drop was 28 February. But it is give or take, depending on how dry that day is and how cold or warm the winter has been until then. Yet it is never far out.

At Kingley Vale, three miles north-west of Chichester, there are 30,000 yew trees in the national nature reserve. Half of them are male. All winter each of those male trees has been priming its tens of thousands of tiny flowers for this orgasmic event. These, no bigger than a match head, are minute fir cones. They look like the starry sky as they prepare to explode.

Week by week, these yellow fires have grown, from pin-heads in October to the bursting bubble of pollen that we see this very day. Then, if you are there at the moment, you will be astonished at the sudden clouds of living smoke the gusts of wind take from every bough and tree.

You may say the trees are on fire, smoke is pouring from them. It is. It is the fire of creation.

Each tree must surely feel elation if not excitement at this moment; these one or two moments of the year to which it has climbed and longed for. It is a moment like that for the salmon when it sheds its milt around its chosen mate in the gravel beds of its own home river. It is a moment like that as the stag or buck in the forest mounts briefly his doe and impregnates her and ensures that life continues. No wonder Tennyson called it ‘the living smoke’ after his late February walk in the Valley of the Kings.

You may find the ‘smoke’ gets in your eyes or in your throat. Billions upon billions of pollen grains explode from the trees and are in the air all around you. They are carried on upon the wind for many miles. Female trees alone five miles away receive this force of life.

Many land on the pin-prick green anemone-shaped flowers of the female trees, now all open on the boughs like coral flowers in the sea. How gladly they must receive and how tight they must cling to these almost invisible codes of life that as single units we can hardly see. They grasp and bind upon them and the living pattern for another mighty tree which may still be there in a thousand years is formed.

In a fortnight, all the flower cones are done and dead and are scattered and lie like grains of sand upon a seashore. The male tree then has another task, which is to grow new needles, photosynthesise the sunlight, and make energy for next spring again.

The females grow their many thousand embryos like small green buttons, then change them into pips like pistol bullets and clothe them in red jelly to entice the birds in September next. At Kingley Vale, the Normans and perhaps the Romans saw all this on what today are ancient trees, long before the time of Tennyson.