Yew berries (always remember this plant is poisonous...see staff note)

I've been thinking about conifers to add in my forest garden for extra winter photosynthesis (hate to waste those photons) and was thinking about yew.  I've eaten the berries before out of curiosity and they're not bad, but nothing I would see myself eating more than a couple of.  Hmmm, maybe I just need good recipes?  Anyone know of any?  I did a very quick search and wanted to share this one for, if nothing else, a bit of fun....might give it a try (I'll make a tiny one the first time).

Yew berry tart!
https://fergustheforager.co.uk/recipe/yew-berry-tart/
The author mentioned drying the berries to intensity the sweetness as well (after removing the toxic seed), which I'd love to try too.

Greg Martin wrote:I've been thinking about conifers to add in my forest garden for extra winter photosynthesis (hate to waste those photons) and was thinking about yew.

Never thought about it that way... cool perspective. Japanese gardens tend to be designed to have attractive foliage through all four seasons as a matter of course. The one I inherited is similar. I have plenty of foliage... too much foliage in most seasons, just enough in winter perhaps.

On topic: I've never had yew berries, but I figure you can make a jam type of thing out of any fruit. If it doesn't go well on toast, maybe better on crackers with cheese.

I quite liked yew berries too. They were pleasantly sweet. The thing I disliked slightly was the slightly slimy texture - probably drying would improve that though. Yew berry jam could be the next gourmet craze - like the hottest chilli or puffer fish. Dare death with deadly plants...(it's all the rest of the tree that is poisonous I gather).
I planted several yew in my windbreaks, but they don't seem to like Skye. I think after ten years the survivors (I think there may be two out of six planted) are still a bit smaller than when I planted them!

Any thread about eating yew needs a massive health warning.

The flesh of the berries is edible (but has a strange slimy texture). Every other part of the plant is lethal in even very small doses - leaves, bark, seeds etc... The active compound in the leaves is used in tiny doses in heart medication.

We lost three sheep in a few minutes when they got access to a single dead, wilted yew branch. They still had yew leaves in their mouths from chewing. For a human, chewing even a single leaf could be fatal.

That level of toxicity is kinda terrifying.
Being who I am, I'm immediately wondering if we can use it for something .
Protecting young trees from browsing comes to mind.
That being said, I get rid of pokeweed because of the potential that kids might eat it, so yew is definitely not welcome in my yards.

I like the berries (anils, I think technically) enough, though i can’t see the standard hedge variety being with the trouble of processing in large amount, since you need to get the hard, poisonous seed out of the berry which is a thin-skinned mass of bland, sweet goo. More just a garden nibble. Apparently there are some varieties with larger, plum-sized berries in north Asia. Those might be more worthwhile.

While I appreciate that other parts of the plant are poisonous, there’s dozens of yews on every block in my neighborhood and I’ve never heard of anyone poisoning themselves on yew. The leaves and branches are not appetizing in the slightest. Maybe permies need warnings more then ordinary folks who assume nothing is edible.

Mk Neal wrote: Maybe permies need warnings more then ordinary folks who assume nothing is edible.

This bears some self reflection!

11,197 cases of exposure to yew were examined. The vast majority of cases were for kids under 12.

92.5% of the cases resulted in zero side-effects.
7% of cases resulted in minor side-effects.

Major effects were reported in only 4 cases.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9656977/

Is the yew really poisonous to you?
E P Krenzelok  1 , T D Jacobsen, J Aronis
J Toxicol Clin Toxicol. 1998;36(3):219-23.

I wish I had a female yew. I have a male that is about 20 feet in diameter, right next to my house. Makes a lovely scene and bird hangout spot, especially in winter. However, in the spring time, it's rather brutal to be near. The pollen is also toxic and causes my partner and I to have chest pain (yew is cardiotoxic), headaches, brain fog and fatigue for about a week or so. We're going to wear N-95 masks and take other precautions in the future. I really hope that it's true that they can change sex and he turns into a she, but I digress. Yew is apparently one of the most allergenic plants around. Just something for folks to be aware of before planting, especially if they already tend towards pollen allergy.

When my twins were a little under two, they each simultaneously ate a yew berry each while we were in England. We spent four hours in the hospital for observation. Fortunately, they didn’t poison themselves. The A&E doctor said that we were fortunate that they didn’t have molars yet, so the seed was able to pass through. He also said that if they had managed to crack the seed, we could have had a very different conversation. That was a bad day that could have been worse.  One of the things we learned during those hours was that toxicity varies quite a lot, and that there is some suggestion that English yews are more toxic than those we find here in the US, but not a lot of academic work has been done on the subject.
I also remember reading about multi-person suicide involving yew, but I’m not going to post those details here. Yew is, or can be, deadly. If you’re going to have enough to eat them, you might be considering mechanical processing of some sort, which is never perfect, and seeds could slip through. Would a few cooked seeds poison a whole cooking project? I don’t know. Is it worth it to find out? I doubt it.

<edit>I’m appreciative of the above link to an academic paper. The authors note that there may be significant positive bias in their work, meaning that there *may* be more adverse outcomes than their survey indicates. Other related papers on that same page are include information about how ineffective most treatments tend to be when poisoning does happen, and they go right to “extracorporeal life support.”

William Bronson wrote:

Mk Neal wrote: Maybe permies need warnings more then ordinary folks who assume nothing is edible.

This bears some self reflection!

This may be true...a couple of weeks ago I sampled a mushroom that I was having a hard time identifying... (I was 99% sure it wasn't poisonous.)
No lectures please haha... I already got chewed out by coworkers but I am still here

Also the tart is beautiful and I'm going to try it...recipe?