The Scriptorium of Nature

The Yew, On Love

On a hill, in the south west of England, lives a grand old lady of fifteen hundred years at least. She stands her ground beside a church tower, home to the local murder of crows, but largely overlooked by the humans who come only to visit her. They arrive in ones and twos, a polite stream of hushed voices, to make wishes and leave offerings of painted stones and shells, a Christmas angel to balance in a hollow, a chipped glass of finest Buckfast mead. She is, after all, the Yew Tree of Dartington Hall.

What has this tree witnessed in all those years, what stories, secrets and memories is she keeping of the lives lived out in the medieval halls around her? When you step beneath her shade, picking your way through the weathered headstones of lords, ladies and knights now sadly nameless, there is something other than just the echo of human trace, there is an intelligence that comes from the tree. She gives out a particular intensity, a downward pull, a special invitation to explore what lies in the rooted earth beneath.

Our ancestors knew the Yew to be the guardian of the underworld, he or she who escorts our souls onwards and down, hence the huddle of hopeful graves close under her branches. Some still believe her to be eternal, an unbroken lineage from the original tree of life, a beacon, a portal, certainly to be revered and respected. If you make friends with this tree, you court the potential for great transformation in your life, not something you’d want to do without serious and conscious intent.

Last Summer I ceremoniously left a dog daisy from the magical gardens of Dartington at the feet of this lady yew. When I came back later, to visit her again, I found that another suitor had placed a fresh red rose on top of my white, now wilted, flower. This beautiful and poetic gesture made me wonder what, if anything, this tree could know about love, more than me I’m sure, after all her years stood still in this one ancient place. I asked her, listening hard to the creak and rustle inside and out, and it’s possible that this is what she said.

“I, this yew tree, Eo, find that love is about committing to a piece of ground, as far down and as far up as you can reach into it. It is the intimacy with every being you share it with, however fleeting their experience of this life, however fast their heart beats against the slow heartbeat of your own. It is about knowing every breath of the air, every brush of delicate feather, every blind tender touch of those who move against you underground. It is the gentle dance with those that stand beside you, respecting these dear friends who cannot fail across the eons.

Love is, for me, about standing right here, with my arms and fingers spread out, at the place where the sky meets the earth and offering each one to the other, over and over again in an always changing but perfectly balanced form. It is about drinking in all that this space, in this time, has to offer and giving it back to itself in an expression of inexpressible beauty. It is joy made solid. It is endurance made visible. It is testament to the imagination of all things here. It is allurement with no expectation, acceptance of all who come, it is reliance on them to do no harm.

Love, for me, is about not giving up over the longest time, of finding a way always, because there is no possibility to run, or another place to go. It is about certainty and mastery of your own form and function and how that can be of service to all beings who live within and upon you. It is the ultimate in non-self. It is about diversity of form, the movement of light and dark, complexity of crevice and curve, a green velvet coat or bare patches of broken skin. It is about being the great silence from which the song of this day, of all days in this place, begins.”

When the tree had spoken, whether or not in these exact words which are my clumsy translation only, I looked around with finely tuned eyes at the vivid love stories surrounding her, the heart-songs of this place, the small events playing out in this moment of her great long life. There are lovers entangled on the stairs, oblivious to the cafe crowd, a gentle man guiding his unsteady mother to a seat in the shade, a proud-tailed dog guarding a new crib, a woman sat alone and wondering perhaps, if she had more courage, more patience, whether things might be different.

What could we learn of our fleeting human experiences, if we could hear more clearly the voices of the older, perhaps wiser, intelligences and beings around us? In the Romani Gypsy tradition, as told to me by Jasper Lee, it is well known that the most ancient wisdom and knowledge of the world is held in plain sight but hidden to us now, in the trees. As long as these old beings, like the Yew Tree of Dartington, stand among us, there is a source of guidance we could access to remind ourselves what it means to belong. We can always ‘come home to the trees’*.

Conversations with trees are more simple than we imagine, I am told. They are best conducted from a position of stillness, with humility and gratitude, and allowed to develop over time. It’s important to come with an open heart and to learn how to trust what you hear. I imagine that most of us have a tree we are drawn to, or a tree that is drawing us and perhaps it is already speaking to us in our dreams, intuitions, decisions. It is more polite, they say, to take an offering, a daisy or a rose, and to turn your back when talking, you should never look a tree in the eye.

If you wonder about these things too, join Animate Earth for an online writing circle, a Nature Scriptorium that looks at different ways of listening to and writing for the many voices of other than humans, so they might be included in the conversations of our times.

Recommended Course: Nature Scriptorium, October 2025

Recommended Reading: Patrick Jasper Lee, Coming Home To The Trees

Recommended Watching: Oxford Real Farming Conference 2025, discussion on The Common Wild Tongue with Patrick MacManaway, Brid Walsh, Richard Gantlett and Adam Brocklehurst