Holy Trinity Minchinhampton has been getting hands‑on with its ancient churchyard heritage, as volunteers turned out for “Love Your Yew Week” — a national campaign celebrating and caring for some of the UK’s oldest living trees.
This was the second year of the campaign, which was led by Caring for God’s Acre. This year there was a particular focus on the condition of the ground around the trees, encouraging the careful clearance of debris and competing growth beneath the canopy and for at least one metre beyond it, to help protect the yew’s far-reaching root system.
Twelve volunteers from the church community at Holy Trinity gave an hour of their time on Valentine’s Day to show the yew trees some love. They cleared fallen logs, removed ivy from the trunks and pulled out growth beneath the trees.
“We made a start on clearing our yew trees, and will continue over the coming months,” said the Revd Gerald South of Minchinhampton with Box and Amberley Benefice. “During a cup of coffee afterwards we watched a video about yews and by the end of the morning felt that we had started a ‘’relationship’ with these trees.
“We will continue to mulch, for example with leaves, and expect our yews, currently just a few hundred years old, to still be here in 3026.”
Yew trees offer a valuable habitat for wildlife, especially when their trunks split into two or more parts which form a sheltered space in the middle.
“If a branch droops to the ground it can start to produce roots and a new tree is created,” Gerald said. “They don’t need very much by way of care, but their roots don’t like being in compressed soil or getting entangled with the roots of other plants, such as grass and ivy.”
‘Love Your Yew Week’ is one of the national projects supported by Caring for God’s Acre, the charity dedicated to conserving the UK’s burial grounds. Although the week has now passed, churches can still get involved with ‘Love Your Burial Ground week with Churches Count on Nature‘, running from 6 to 14 June. It invites churches and communities to take practical action for wildlife and record the species present in their burial grounds.
Caring for our churchyards is part of the Land section of A Rocha’s Eco Church Award→
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