Cossacks cut them with knives. The female part finally died

This does not apply only to the Henryków Yew growing in Henryków Lubański in Lower Silesia near Zgorzelec. This applies to all yew trees, some of which are still alive today and many thousands of years old.

E.g. The age of yew has been estimated to be 5,000 years by Fordinghall in Scotland.. There is some doubt about him, some say he is younger and only 2-3 thousand years old. Anyway, the Guinness Book records another yew from under the church of St. The digina in Llangerni, North Wales, is estimated to be 4,000 years old, although, for example, the digico spruce growing in Sweden is said to be much older.

However, if we talk about the age of yew trees, it is not only about the trees that are growing today, but their branches include all the old oaks and beeches and are next to some old trees such as sequoias. The Methuselah pine from California is 4,855 years old Remembers the last mammoths.

Yews are very old trees, and we can talk about them … The beginning of trees on earth. These beginnings date back to the Devonian, 400 million years ago when a major breakthrough occurred in the history of life on Earth. Only the plants spread and stopped covering the ground. Certain compounds in their cells allowed them to start growing upwards. This is how the first forests were created, the oldest of which, 390 million years old, was discovered in Minehead, West England in March 2024, a global sensation of the year.

Steven Spielberg, in the Netflix movie “Life on Planet Earth,” linked this development to the formation of lignin in plant cells, known from tissues and clothing.

Yew is one of the oldest trees on Earth. One of the first conifers to grow upwards, it surpassed all deciduous trees and changed the appearance of the Earth. Yews are never particularly diverse, but they are the oldest in terms of being on Earth.

Their oldest representatives are often record holders of individual countries. Balderschwang – a yew that grows in Bavaria – is probably the oldest tree in Germany, Hubpi is one of the oldest or oldest trees in Austria, and the Caesarsboom or Caesar tree is the oldest tree in Belgium, as this yew is called. Remember the times of Julius Caesar and ancient Rome.

What does our oldest tree remember? The age of Henrikovski U from Henrików Lubanski was once estimated at 1,200-1,500 years. In “Dendrologia” written by Włodzimierz Seleta in 1987, you can read that yew is 1,250 years old. About.

Subsequent tests carried out on wood proved more accurate. In 1992, the age of the giant was calculated to be 1,253 years – these are the estimates of Cesari Paciniak. So, 32 years from today, it will be 1,285 years. As of 2020, Yu's age is very accurately calculated to be 1,282 years. So the differences are over the years.

If so, then Henrikovski U must have grown in Lower Silesia in the years 737-739, the kingdom of the Franks and Charles Martel, the creation of the epic “Beowulf” and the settlement of Poland by the first Slavic tribes.. Ślężanie, Bobrzanie, Dziadoszanie – if such tribes really existed, one of these people could have grown here, in Lower Silesia, with a young tree.

Therefore, Henrikovski U these lands probably belonged to the Great Moravian State, surviving the times of Boleslaw's bravery, Czech rule, the Thirty Years' War, and annexation to Poland during the rule of the Saxons. The Napoleonic Wars became a turning point when, during Napoleon's Russian campaign, the army retreated and the Battle of Leipzig took place. Then, in 1813, Cossack soldiers cut the stems with swordsPerhaps by sharpening them or under the influence of some form of entertainment.

However, what troubled Yu most was not the Cossacks, but the retreat of the German army towards the Neisse River in 1945 and the pursuit of the Red Army. Then a bullet damaged the tree. In 1989, a powerful storm came and the ancient yew tree suffered severe damage. They say that what is called then the female branch is already dead and only the male branch is alive.

That is the symptom At key moments in Poland's history, the tree experienced severe turmoil – 1813, 1945, 1989.

Henrikovskiy Yew sprouted green shoots and needles in 2020, so it is alive. Jerzy Stolarczyk, a dendrologist, naturalist and a man fighting for the yew's survival, told PAP: “Trees have a great inertia and it takes years to stop the bad processes. It takes another 15 years for the tree to become stable.”

Yellowing of yew needles started in 2014. Not sure why this is happening. Perhaps old age? However, for a Yu, 1,285 years is still nothing. It turned out that The reason for the drying up is the decline in ground water. He has no access to ground water. And it will be hard to change. Yew has a special reinforcing scaffold and a watering and spraying system. The shoots it has sprouted in 2020 give hope that our generation will not be the last in its long history.