Yew Ideas, Tips & Guides

I’ve loved Wales ever since university days in Swansea, so we always try to fit in a family holiday or weekend there. This August, we hired a cottage on Anglesey for a week to take advantage of its wonderful sandy beaches, the epic landscape of nearby Snowdonia and the many wonderful historic gardens on offer. With my wife, two teenage sons and mother coming, there was something for everyone – perfect for a varied, budget-friendly, three-generation holiday (even if the car on the way up was a bit of a squeeze).

Pale brick pavers, laid in a herringbone pattern, run from the open-plan ground floor out into the garden, creating a seamless transition between the two spaces.

A farm turned garden near Toledo in Spain by landscape designer Fernando Martos

Boasting some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside, the Lake District, in the north-west corner of England, is a draw for anyone with a love of the outdoors. Its hills and mountains, including England’s highest, Scafell Pike at 978m, attract walkers and climbers, while in the valley bottoms, vast lakes, such as Windermere and Ullswater, invite quiet contemplation.

The entrance to your house creates that all-important first impression when visitors arrive, so why not use plants around your front door to enhance curb appeal and welcome you back home? There are so many choices to suit all house and garden styles from geometrical topiary to frame a formal entrance, to ferns, heucheras and hostas for shady front porches, and elegant displays of fragrant summer perennials and colourful annuals to create the perfect cottage garden look.

A double row of clipped topiary pieces in the yew garden at Beckley Park

Evergreens keep their leaves all year round, so are a must in any garden. They’re particularly good choices in winter when their green foliage adds some much-needed interest and structure to a bare garden. Here, we share some of our favourite evergreens. There are options to suit any style of garden, as well as ideas for evergreen hedges. Our choices include recommendations from the Gardeners’ World team and familiar faces from across the gardening industry.

Made up of mellow stone buildings, many of which are medieval, the city of Oxford is the ideal base for an exploration of Oxfordshire. The city itself is picturesque, but also compact, making it easy to walk around and take in the many sights on offer. See the college buildings that make up the University of Oxford, visit the world’s oldest museum, the Ashmolean, to see its Egyptian and Anglo-Saxon treasures, and admire Oxford Botanic Garden, Britain’s oldest botanical garden, right in the heart of the city.

Celebrate the season with these festive 2-for-1 Garden events. Use your2-for-1 Gardens entry card this December to discover some of the most exciting winter events taking place, be transported to Narnia at Leeds Castle or marvel at the 18m dried flower garland at Cotehele.

Did you know that some trees (such as alder, poplar, willow, ash and the dawn redwood) can “hold their breath” when the ground in which they grow is flooded? Or that others, such as the silver lime (Tilia tomentosa), have evolved ingenious ways of conserving their water supply when confronted with extreme heat and drought, including covering their leaves with a layer of fine hairs to keep them cool in sunny weather?

Tips for Growing Japanese Yews Taxus cuspidata

How to Grow and Care for Hicks Yews Taxus x media ‘Hicksii’

With sloping hills that form a dramatic escarpment as they slip into the plain of the River Severn, the Cotswolds, spanning Gloucestershire and parts of Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, epitomise rural charm. Rivers like the Windrush flow swiftly through pretty villages, gigantic yews fill the yards of churches built in the Middle Ages, and scattered across it are lovely gardens, both grand and modest, all of them embellished with beautiful flowers.

A walled garden hidden away in London's busy Spitalfields neighbourhood

Q: I have an overgrown thuja with heathers growing underneath, which have become leggy. These are situated in a raised bed surrounding my patio, and provide a screen to the raised patio. What shall I plant instead and at what time of the year? UC, Co Limerick

This month we are celebrating the castles in our 2-for-1 Gardens scheme. Bursting with history and grandeur, they are great sites to explore as the weather gets a little cooler. In the gardens, find plenty of horticultural interest, from poison gardens to sculpted yews. Make sure to use your 2-for-1 Gardens card on your visit to ensure you’re making savings on your day out.

The 18th century Union Jack Gardens at Wentworth Castle were originally called the ‘wilderness’. It was dense with shapes, texture and contrasts of shade and light. Now it may be a suitable place to take a seat in the garden and see the original Yew trees and the variegated ‘creamed’ Hollies.

Yew are used in many contexts and can feature in natural or formal situations. In the 18th century species of Taxus were brought to the UK from America and Asia to add to our native Taxus baccata. There are now many cultivars of upright, pendulous and ground cover forms of Yew.

Giving trees what I call the ‘Royal Chop’ is not as drastic as it sounds. It is one way of controlling the low growing branches that restrict light, create unwanted shade  and generally get in the way. The technical term may be to ‘Lift the Crown’ which has the result of leaving the lower trunk clear of branches and letting the growth starting at an acceptable height.

Taxus baccata ‘Repandens Aurea’ came to me like so many plants as a rooted cutting many years ago, a misshapen little nothing two gardening friends convinced me to order by mail. (You can sometimes get one at Forest Farm, though not every year.) It is about half way now to a mature size of perhaps 12 feet across and 2 to 4 feet high, and though it’s still irregularly shaped the yew has taken on considerable presence when I recall the wretched thing it was the day that I unpacked it from its traveling suit of wet newsprint.I actually have three of the spreading golden yews here. (Why is it that I order everything in threes? Is it my lopsided version of Noah’s Ark?). The one shown (top) is swimming in a lake of big-root geranium, G. macrorrhizum. It’s a bed where I recently decided to up the golden quotient by adding a cutleaf golden staghorn sumac, Rhus typhina ‘Tiger Eyes’ (background), another plant whose leaves I lo

More of a good thing, I guess you could say, and also deer-resistant.The Japanese plum yew has linear, dark green flat needles that resemble its namesake’s: the yew, or Taxus. Those are its needles and also its male reproductive structures, below; ‘Prostrata’ is all-male, and therefore makes no female seed-producing structures.While Taxus is deer candy, though, Cephalotaxus is rated as not to their liking by experts from geographic areas as diver

The thing about plant geeks is that they can find the most seemingly insignificant bit of greenery to be cool.The flora that fascinates us would make a layman’s ey