The Sacred Yew: Rediscovering the Ancient Tree of Life Through the Work of Allen Meredith

This volume centres on the work of Allen Meredith, who for 14 years has been tracking down and charting all Britain's yew trees, and whose life is now dedicated to their preservation. His discovery that many of these trees are thousands rather than hundreds of years old is now accepted by botanists like David Bellamy, and his theory that the Magna Carta was signed, not at Runnymede, but beneath a yew tree just across the Thames, has also found scholarly support. Meredith has a visionary belief in the importance of the yew tree to life on Earth, and the other main strand of the book is a study of the tree's role in Christian and pre-Christian tradition: the inspiration of the ancient festival of yule, was it also the Nordic tree of life, Yggdrasil?