‘I imagined the flow of energy from the mother trees as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child.’ Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree. On a rainy Sunday I took a camera and went to Llandre churchyard near Aberystwyth in search of a 1000 year old yew, possibly one of the oldest trees in West Wales. I had been reading ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ published in 2021 by Suzanne Simard, a Canadian Forest Ecologist at the University of British Columbia, and wanted to see this lonely yew that had stood through so many years, standing beside these graves. The book had given me a renewed sense of wonder about these aged trees, what they have seen, and what they can teach us. Our native common yew can live the longest of all the UK's native tree species with individual trees able to reach an incredible 3,000 years of age. They are defined as ‘ancient’ from around 900 years m...