Are there Rare, Forgotten Old-Growth Yews in Pacific Spirit Park?
- Ryan Regier
- 9 hours ago
- 16 min read
As I got close to the Yew Tree I was hunting, the steep ground I was on collapsed as the soil gave way. I fell downward, tumbling with uprooted small trees and plants, right toward the Yew. As I reached to grab the Yew to save myself, my mind immediately flashed to the story of Prometheus.
Not the one from Greek Mythology, but Prometheus the Tree. A Bristlecone Pine that was the world’s oldest single living organism, until it was cut down by a Graduate Student to count its growth rings and date it. By finding and aging the tree, they had killed it. The shock of what had been done is where the name Prometheus came from. In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole the fire from the Gods and gave it to humankind. The Tree, likewise, had been removed from immortality and had become mortal.
Was I about to kill this Yew Tree I was hunting? A Tree I was hunting to try to prove was an Old-Growth Tree! My full, out-of-control, body weight wrenching the roots out of an already unstable canyon face? As I grabbed the Yew by instinct, I cringed, and a soft yell of ‘No!” came out of me.
But the Yew was like a rock and did not move even the tiniest amount.
I looked down into the valley below me, sweating, and pressed my forehead against the Yew. Thank You, I said with relief. The Yew had not only saved me, but by holding so fast and strong, it confirmed what I thought. I was correct, this was an old-growth tree. One of the last remaining old-growth trees in the highly trafficked and highly urban area of Pacific Spirit Park in Vancouver.
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For six years now, I have been leading Forest Walking Tours for the Pacific Spirit Park Society in Vancouver. By far the most popular walk I lead is my Pacific Yew walk (Taxus brevifolia. Also called 'Western Yew') Yews are strange, mysterious, and incredible species of tree that people often become obsessed with. Ancient texts claim falling asleep under a Yew could cause death or hallucinations. Yew bark and needles were long used as poison by assassins and kings. Yew wood was always in high demand across both continents as the best wood for staffs or bows.
Whenever a ‘Bog Body’ or ‘Ice Person’ is found, their tools always seem to be made out of Yew. Pacific Northwest Indigenous people used Yew as ‘Wedges’. The sharp metal part of an axe. Yew had such strong wood that it was used to cut other wood! Also, how about the seemingly immortal Yews (Taxus baccata) that grow in European churchyards and graveyards, and could be over a thousand years old? There is a long history of poets like Woodworth or Sylvia Plath being inspired by these trees. The Death Tree. Bringing us to the current Yew Renaissance. Where Yew has become a Life-Giving Tree. Yew produces the best anti-cancer medicine that we’ve ever discovered: Taxol.
It’s not hard to find an online article or book where the author is just running through a seemingly endless list of incredible stories attached to Yew Trees. I have an article of my own that does this! One I wrote for the Pacific Spirit Park Society’s Website, entitled; Pacific Yew Tree: A Fantasy Tree Turned Real. Yew really does seem like a tree that J.R.R. Tolkien invented and not one that should actually exist in real life. Now in modern times, with its incredibly sophisticated anti-cancer chemical, it has also become a Tree out of Science Fiction. A desperate, technology-advanced society struggling with an incurable disease, forced to search the universe for a cure, only to find it on their own planet. Hidden in ancient forests, isolated cliff faces, and incredibly old religious sites.
You can see it was no surprise that my Yew walks were popular! In the North End of Pacific Spirit Park, there are two steep ravine canyons that take rainwater from the Park and deposit it in the ocean. Since Pacific Spirit has such a density of trees, these streams are full of nutrients and create a boom of wildlife.
Salmon actively used both these streams, doing their unbelievable life cycle of somehow sensing and remembering the streams they were born in. Returning after their multi-year ocean adventures to lay eggs and die. Trout and other fish also make use of these nutrient-filled streams, and the Estuary where the streams’ freshwater meets the ocean’s saltwater is packed with fishing birds like Herons and Kingfishers. Seals and Sea Lions also regularly make appearances for the wildlife buffet. Otters and Muskrats swim upstream to fish. Coyotes browse the streams at night. Eagles stand tall on old Douglas Firs on the cliff and watch, with their binocular eyes, unsuspecting seals or fish that they can snatch. And most excitingly, we have lately seen a return of Whales to the area.
These dense canyon streams, with moisture in the air and inaccessible by humans, are the perfect habitat for a Yew Tree.
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In May 2026, I was reviewing my notes and preparing for a Yew Walk in Pacific Spirit that I would be leading in a couple of days, and then I got an email that had my head spinning. An email from Ira Sutherland! A Vancouver Tree Legend! Ira spent many years searching and identifying all the large old-growth trees in Vancouver and documenting them on his masterpiece of a website, VancouverBigTrees.com. For the first year or so I lived in Vancouver, I was using his website almost every day. I still regularly look at it to consult and double-check things. I’ve based my own Forest Education work and writing on how Ira does it.
Ira was the one who got me thinking critically about the Pacific Yews in the north section of the Park. It was clear that it was the last remaining patch of Yew Forest in Vancouver (not including the North Shore!), and I thought Ira had figured out why it was there.
On his “UBC’s Forests and Big Trees” page, Ira notes, “I’ve yet found only one mature large yew specimen, which is down West Canyon Trail near where the trail drops down into the ravine above the beach.”
This West Canyon Yew was the “Mother Tree”, I thought. The Old-Growth Tree that had seeded the rest of the Yew Forest.
However, Ira’s email to me said:
Hi Ryan, I am not positive, but I think the yew along the west canyon trail in North Pacific Spirit Park is a European yew. There are a couple of Pacific yews in UBC adjacent to PSP. across from the Bioenergy facility, but that is all I know of. Maybe you know of different ones that are actually Pacific yew?
Uh oh.
My immediate reaction was “Oh my god, I’ve told so many people that those trees were Pacific Yews (Taxus brevifolia) and I was wrong?!” Then came the “Ok, maybe I flee the city and never talk about trees again?” Then the downward spiral bottomed out with a “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been right about anything my entire life. Everything I know or have done has been wrong”.
Then came the “Wait…What?”. If all the Yew in the area were European Yew (Taxus baccata), then holy crap, what an incredible accomplishment for a non-native species. To take over like that and get so big. I was still spiralling, but the excitement of learning something new and amazing began to take hold.
I thought about it more. The earliest and most dominant invasive species in Pacific Spirit Park are Holly and Mountain Ash. These two trees and European Yew are all [A] From Europe, [B] Widely planted on Vancouver City Streets by early Settlers because of ancient Pagan and Christian associations with these trees, [C] Grow extremely well in the Vancouver Climate, and [D] produce bright, berry-like fruit that birds widely spread.
Ira’s claim was starting to make sense to me.
Over the years, multiple ‘botanical-minded’ people have asked me whether a certain Yew tree is Pacific or European. I spent quite a lot of time trying to identify Pacific Yew needles vs European Yew needles. It got me nowhere, though!
The main identification strategy to distinguish between the two is, and I quote, European Yew has “Leaves tapering gradually to a point” and Pacific Yew has “Leaves abruptly pointed”[1] ‘Abruptly’ vs ‘Gradually’ pointed doesn’t help for needle leaves that can be less than a centimeter long and a couple of millimeters wide. Especially when a Yew can have needles that are of very different sizes on the same tree. I once thought I had correctly distinguished the needles by their different points, only to realize that I had confused my needles and was actually comparing two needles from the same Yew Tree. Whoops!
So, when people ask me if it is European vs Pacific, I use context clues. Is it clearly a planted tree on a street or in a park? It’s European. Is it in a dense Native BC Forest? It’s Pacific. What does the tree's shape and bark look like? The Yews I have seen deep in B.C. Forests, which I am confident are Pacific Yew, often have peeling reddish bark, and flat branches on top, without a distinctive ‘tip’ to the tree, or the tree leans over and flattens one way. Pacific Yews also have a lot of dead branches. European Yews, on the other hand, often look much healthier, have multiple stems instead of a single stem, and are much thicker trees.
Ira’s email got me thinking more, though. There definitely were European Yews that had established in the Park. The northwest section of the Park was clear-cut and was an active Dairy Farm with cattle for some years in the early 1900s. In fact, I had a theory a couple of years ago that Ira’s email made me remember. I had noticed that some of the Yews on the north tip of the Park did not have the distinctive ‘almost dead’ look that I was used to seeing with Pacific Yews. My theory, very similar to what Ira was saying, was that there were both non-native European Yews and native Pacific Yews in the Park.
Yews are known to hybridize very easily across different Yew species. Meaning that pollen (male reproductive cell) from European Yew could combine with the ovule (female reproductive cell) from Pacific Yew, to produce a new Yew that was half Pacific and half European. Perhaps some Yews in the Park were Pacific, some were European, and some were a combination?
Ira later suggested to me, and my research confirms this, that many Experts think because Yew hybridizes so easily that it may just be one species. One species spread across the globe that has distinctive subspecies. Much like how Shore Pine is a species of Lodgepole Pine that just grows smaller and shrubbier because it is often on rocky, coastal cliff faces. Perhaps all Yews are the same species, but just grow differently because they are in different environments?
The question still remains, though. Could all of these Yews along the Pacific Spirit Park northern canyons be European Yews?
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The specific Yew that Ira was talking about along West Canyon Trail - which he originally thought was Pacific but now he thought could be European - exists in a strange ‘forest edge’ area. The forest uphill of canyon slope it is on is a combination of non-native and native plants. Typical of a forest with heavy human disturbance. Exactly what would you expect to grow back after a clear-cut of a forest surrounded by a city.
As you get closer to the steep drop into the stream valley, the forest structure changes, with bigger native trees appearing and understory plants – Oregon grape and sword fern - that indicate less disturbance. In fact, right beside the Yew is one of the best indications I have seen of a forest area being at least a hundred years old: a large, standing dead Alder tree.
Alder trees grow quickly and need a patch of sun to establish. They are a “pioneer tree’ and usually the first to establish after a disturbance. However, they are also common in old-growth forests, capitalizing on patches of sun when big trees fall. A large, old, dead alder usually means to me that this forest area was disturbed a hundred years ago and then grew back.
This makes sense with the history of logging in the area. Jeremiah Rogers logged the area in the last few decades of the 1800s. Jerry, as he was called, had his logging camp on an L-shaped cove he had made at a beach further east of the park. A beach that became known as Jerry’s Cove, and soon, with some undeniable Christian influence, was renamed Jericho.
When Jerry logged Pacific Spirit Park, he didn’t bother going after the small or hard-to-access trees. He was ‘High Grading’. Just going after just the giant trees, especially Douglas Fir. Moving these giants did do a lot of damage to the surrounding forest. Imagine trying to drag a massive tree through a forest, you would crush a lot of the smaller trees. However, a lot of logging in Pacific Spirit Park left the canyon slopes almost untouched.
These canyon slopes were hard to access. Which I can attest to by almost falling down one! Also, because steep slopes are by their nature unstable, trees along these slopes don’t get so big. They grow slowly and carefully, ensuring their roots are secure. Ensuring that they are not too tall and exposed to wind that might blow them over.
In fact, small trees growing on steep slopes are actually where we find some of the oldest trees in the world.
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I grew up in Southwestern Ontario and spent a considerable amount of time hiking along the Niagara Escarpment. A steep cliff wall that runs north-to-south in Ontario and is the reason behind Niagara Falls, where water from Lake Erie falls 50 meters down into Lake Ontario. Growing along this cliff face are all sorts of tiny, withered trees. Seemingly barely surviving in such a desolate, lonely area.
In the 1980s, University of Guelph Professor Douglas Larson discovered that tiny Eastern White Cedar (The sister species of our larger Western Redcedar, whose scale-leaves are practically identical) growing on the cliffs were over 1,000 years old.
Larson began travelling all over the world and finding previously unknown old-growth trees. Incredibly ancient, tiny trees on cliff faces. Growing infinitely slow and almost reaching immortality.
I highly recommend his 2007 book: The Last Stand: A Journey Through the Ancient Cliff-Face Forest of the Niagara Escarpment.
Larson discovered tiny, ancient Yews on cliffs as well. In the Great Orme cliffs in Wales, he found Yews that he counted 400 rings on, but that he believed were actually 700 to 800 years old.
Yews have notoriously hard wood to take core samples of the date. Larson found them very frustrating:
“Obtaining the tree core required strength, concentration and a barrage of foul language. The trees were often hollow or split, and a large percentage of the tree rings were missing.”[2]
Yews are a hard species to age. In Dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet’s 2020 book, Tree Story: The History of The World in Written Rings, she describes having tense arguments about whether ancient hollow Yews in British Churchyards could be over 3,000 years old. The Yews being hollow made them impossible to date, yet there are a large number of people who believe these Yews go back to the pre-Christian era. Believing they were ancient pagan sites that were co-opted by Christianity.
Trouet argues that while we know Yews can get up to 800 years old, this is still a “far cry” from 3,000 years. We often have a tendency to overestimate the ages of “Heritage Trees”. I’ve seen this first-hand myself. People often tell me that they believe the big tree in front of their house is a leftover from old-growth logging. It’s a challenging thing to do, then explain to them that, actually, this tree is a species native to another continent. Which means it was 100% planted and likely less than a hundred years old. Vancouver’s long growing season can make some young trees grow to be massive. Trees are very flexible in changing their growth rate depending on the location and the climate.
Yews have maybe the most impressive ability to quickly change their growth rate. They can grow incredibly quickly, which is one of the reasons they are a favourite for hedges. They can also be one of the slowest-growing trees in the world. Their slowest annual ring width growth is 0.095 mm a year.[3] Which means that a hundred-year-old tree could only be 2 cm thick!
This information about the tree slope ecology and flexible growth rates does not confirm that our Pacific Spirit Park Yews are European or Pacific, but it does show that old-growth Yews often exist in hard-to-reach areas like these canyon slopes.
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Yews, being a rare species with all of these fantastical properties, make them a very enjoyable tree to hunt for in the forest. Multiple people who have come on my Yew walks have told me that they now regularly seek out and identify Yews while hiking. There is something meditative and peaceful about it. Finding these small trees and knowing they are special. Yews reward the hunting as well, because every once and awhile you find a particularly large one or a big group of them. When that happens, it feels like you have been transported back to ancient times. A friend and I keep a ‘Yew Score’ when we go hiking. Whoever can find the most Yew Trees wins.
On my Yew walks, I teach people how to identify Yews and, in classic tree identification fashion, people soon learn to identify the trees by their “Yewness”. They don’t look for bark colour, needle length, or size. They begin to recognize Yews immediately by their shape. Similar to how you might have a hard time describing what a loved one looks like, but still be able to recognize them immediately.
On the Yew Walk I led after Ira’s email, I decided I would switch things up a bit. I wouldn’t just take people to the Yews whose locations I knew and had identified. We would do some actual Old-Growth hunting. Walking along the canyon slope to see if we could find particularly large – and maybe old-growth – Yews.
I had actually not yet found the potential old-growth Yew on the West Canyon Trail and was excited to see if we could find it.
To my great surprise and delight, we didn’t just find Ira’s West Canyon Yew, we found two more potential old-growth trees.
We first found Ira’s West Canyon Yew. Lesley Douglas, a local Biologist/Ecologist, spotted the distinctive yew bark through the trees. It is next to invisible from the trail! I later returned to measure the diameters of each of the Yews, and this Yew was by far the biggest, with a thickness/diameter of 41.2 cm.
Quick side note here that the biggest Yew in B.C. is 97 cm thick. The biggest Douglas Fir is 423 cm. So, 41.2 cm isn’t that thick for a tree, but as any Pacific Yew spotter will tell you, that’s very big for a Yew tree.
The West Canyon Yew sits on a platform-like outcrop, which likely is its root base, and it has a 3-meter steep drop right beside it. The canyon stream is maybe another 40-50 meters below. As mentioned earlier, the presence of a large dead alder makes me think it has been there a long time. There is also a dense, moss-covered, curving Vine Maple right beside it. Another indication of an older BC Forest.
Walking north down the trail, local Birder, Prachi Khanna, somehow spotted our second large yew. This one was on a less steep part of the canyon, but like Ira’s Yew, it also sat on its own platform with a steep drop right beside it. Its diameter is 35.9 cm.
Further north, within sight of the ocean, I finally managed to stop being surpassed by my students and found my own potential old-growth yew. A shorter, squatter Yew with a diameter of 23 cm. This was the one I was worried I would kill by trying to date it. The soil in the slope around it was so incredibly loose. It fell away almost immediately as I started making my way down the Canyon.
When I grabbed the Yew, and it did not move in the slightest, I knew that it had established very early in the area. That all the other plants had grown around it. This was an Ancient Yew.
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I’ve saved my best argument that these Yew trees in Pacific Spirit Park are old-growth Pacific Yews for last.
Here is an 1869 map of tree types and logging activity in UBC, Pacific Spirit Park, and West Point Grey. Originally drawn by Fred W. Green for the Department of Lands and Works and adapted by Gabrielle Kahrer for their 1991 history of Pacific Spirit Park: A Mosaic of Destinies, A Mosaic of Landscapes.[4]
If you look up at the top left of the map, where the North Canyon trails of the Park are located, you’ll see four tree species listed: “fir, hemlock, cedar, yew”.
This map is a very lucky find. As Ira pointed out to me, usually these old tree maps were ‘Timber Cruising’ maps and only recorded trees that were useful for logging purposes. Trees like fir, hemlock, and cedar. Yew is never recorded on these maps because it’s too small to be a lumber tree.
Fred W. Green seemed to have an appreciation for plants beyond just timber, though. Recording the Yews and even non-trees like Cloudberries and Labrador Tea in some areas.
Interestingly, where he records Cloudberries and Labrador Tea is in Camosun Bog, which would have been dominated by those plants at the time. Suggesting that Fred is only really recording non-timber plants if they are dominant. From this, we can conclude – excitingly! – that Pacific Yews were a dominant big species along the Canyon Trails. Which makes it more likely there are, in fact old-growth Pacific Yews remaining.
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What also remains, though, is the question of Hybridization with the European Yews. European Yews have been widely planted as hedges in neighbourhoods that surround the park. Some Yews in the Park have the distinctive shape of European Yews that have been selectively bred to be dense hedges.
I am confident now that both Pacific Yews and European Yews exist in the Park, but what will happen in the future? Will Pacific Yews hybridize and vanish from our forests?
It is worth taking a ‘Deep Time’ look at this and thinking of things in terms of Yew evolution. Yews have been around for 200 million years. Homo Sapiens only been around for a – paltry in comparison - 300 thousand years. Yews and other trees have a long genetic memory going back to supercontinents like Pangea. Back when tree species were all collected on one land mass and not separated by oceans.
My favourite example of this is how B.C.’s native Big Leaf Maple is actually more closely related to Maples from Japan and China rather than Maples of Eastern North America.[5]
Yews might be just one species. A species separated by oceans and time. Finally coming home to each other.
The mystery still remains though. I hope to do some genetic analysis of these Yews in the future! But I need help! I’ll be leading more Yew walks in the next coming months! Please join!
References
[1] Farrar, John Laird. Et al. Trees in Canada. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, and Fitzhenry and Whiteside Limited. 2017
[2] Kelly, P., Larson, D. 2007. The Last Stand : A Journey Through the Ancient Cliff-Face Forest of the Niagara Escarpment, Dundurn Press. Canada
[3] Thomas, P. A., and A. Polwart. "Taxus baccata L." Journal of Ecology 91.3 (2003): 489-524.
[4] Kahrer, Gabrielle, et al. A Mosaic of Destinies, a Mosaic of Landscapes: The History of Pacific Spirit Regional Park, 1860s to 1950s. Greater Vancouver Regional District Parks, 1991.
[5] Gao, Jian, et al. "Historical Biogeography of Acer L. (Sapindaceae): Genetic Evidence for Out-of-Asia Hypothesis with Multiple Dispersals to North America and Europe." Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020, pp. 21178.
