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Concept
Taxus
Summary
Taxus is a genus of coniferous trees or shrubs known as yews in the family Taxaceae. They are relatively slow-growing and can be very long-lived, and reach heights of , with trunk girth averaging . They have reddish bark, lanceolate, flat, dark-green leaves long and broad, arranged spirally on the stem, but with the leaf bases twisted to align the leaves in two flat rows either side of the stem. The oldest known fossil species are from the Early Cretaceous.
The seed cones are highly modified, each cone containing a single seed long partly surrounded by a modified scale which develops into a soft, bright red berry-like structure called an aril, long and wide and open at the end. The arils are mature 6–9 months after pollination, and with the seed contained are eaten by thrushes, waxwings and other birds, which disperse the hard seeds undamaged in their droppings; maturation of the arils is spread over 2–3 months, increasing the chances of successful seed dispersal. The male cones are globose, across, and shed their pollen in early spring. Yews are mostly dioecious, but occasional individuals can be variably monoecious, or change sex with time.
All of the yews are very closely related to each other, and some botanists treat them all as subspecies or varieties of just one widespread species; under this treatment, the species name used is Taxus baccata, the first yew described scientifically. Other sources, however, recognize 9 species, for example the Plant List.
Taxus species appear similar. Attempts at taxonomy vary from describing all yews as subspecies of T. baccata, as did RKF Pilger in 1903, to splitting species by even very small morphological differences, as did R. W. Spjut in 2007 with 25 species and over 50 varieties. Some species have traditionally been recognized by geographic distribution, but Asian species have been more difficult to classify. T. contorta in the Western Himalaya and T. sumatrana in Malesia are now generally agreed upon, but overlapping ranges in the Eastern Himalaya, China, and subtropical southeast Asia have led to greater confusion, with the species T.
Official source
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