Yew

When I stride on my way to the bus in the morning, there they are grazing on the surface of the thicket of the parallel yew hedges in front of the small white house on Mt. Hope Street: hundreds of tiny snails busy working their radulas over the what I suspect is a film of algae growing on the flat needles.

(Suddenly, as I write, two black kittens playing in front of my window.  The two are chasing each other around and on top of a dry paper bag of crackling leaves and sticks. Do they live in the little house I discovered yesterday up against the outside of my fence behind my yew hedge?)

The snails are gone by evening, the hedge looking correct, rectilinear, withdrawn. Long before the heat of the sun, in the cool moisture of dawn, these quiet, persistent creatures emerge from their byres in the thicket to browse their little pasture, the muscles in their foot rippling them forward and their tiny rasp-like tongues gently scraping the leathery surface clean of its green debris.

The yew is sometimes said to be the real Yddrassill, or world tree, of Norse lore and it's still got sacred associations. It's extraordinarily long-lived (estimates from 5-9,000 years), able to sprout new leaves and branches from any sun-touched stem, even to survive the splitting of a stem. For its tough flexibility it was protected by English kings for the making of the longbow. When the ancient Astures of northern Spain were pressed by the Romans, they are said to have chose the poison of the yew to commit suicide. Yet the plant has been used medicinally to treat heart problems and cancer.

I know of the vigor of this plant having cut it back many times in my yard (and needing to do it again soon). But it can see how it can be a place 'where snails may safely graze'. I relish the idea of the sudden eruption of shelled molluscs from their chthonic hiding place, their shells like the heads of the men and women popping up out of the earth when Deucalion and Pyrrha threw stones over their shoulders to repopulate the world after the flood.

You, irascible, advantage-seeking yew, and your gentle snails, have formed a delicate but long-lived partnership, good I hope for each. No noise, no drama, just the slow busy-ness of gastropods dining in the cool of  a September morn.