Yew

Spring is here. Sun heats my uppermost foliage, and flowers erupt from the pimpled skin of my smaller branches. Columbine and strawberries flower in the field nearby, along with the fir trees across the river. I can taste their exuberance, carried through the webs of mycelia and roots we share. In four seasons, the seeds they are forming now will be sprouting around them.

My seeds will not sprout. My own flowers will not be pollinated. I witness pollen travel between the other trees and plants, on wind and bees and butterflies, and know there will be none for my new flowers. There must be no male yew tree growing near enough for his pollen to reach me. I am the only yew here, a female unable to pollinate myself in the way of the firs. Each spring, I wait to see if my seeds will develop, but they never do.

When I was younger, I wondered how the seed that started me found its way here. Was it carried by the river, or did it travel in the belly of an elk? How did I come to be so far away from the rest of my species? I am no longer young and do not expect an answer to my questions.

Several seasons ago, the insects arrived. They laid their eggs on my branches and deep in the crevices of my bark. When the eggs hatched, the emerging larvae latched into my twigs, eating their fill of the resources I had gathered to nourish myself and my potential seeds. Season after season, my body incubates eggs that aren’t my own and dwindles as new generations of nymphs feed. For how many more springs will I be able to produce flowers? Soon, if there is another yew, it won’t matter if his pollen does reach me.

My attention drifts back to the present, to the field steaming in the sun’s heat, water evaporating from the damp soil. Tall grasses swish in the breeze, each with its own characteristic movement. There among the grasses is a new gesture; someone grows pliant and sturdy and low to the ground. Someone who was not there last season, whose kind I have never observed, but whom I already know better than any other. I reach out, signaling through underground networks to the new yew tree. Welcome, seedling.