Taxus floridana

Florida yew is one of the rarest conifers in North America, a shrubby evergreen restricted to a single stretch of steep, cool ravines along the eastern bluffs of the Apalachicola River in the Florida Panhandle, and nowhere else on Earth. A shrub or small tree of the shaded understory, the plant carries flat, soft, dark-green needles and, on female plants, the fleshy scarlet arils that mark every yew.

The tree is almost certainly a relict, a cool-climate survivor left stranded when the ice ages retreated, holding on in the deep, humid, spring-fed ravines that keep the Apalachicola bluffs cooler than the surrounding coastal plain. Yews are generally plants of cool northern and mountain forests, so a wild yew this far south is a botanical marvel and a living fragment of a colder past, closely related to the Mexican yew and long separated from it.

Rarity gives the plant real weight. Florida yew is listed as critically endangered, clinging to a range of only a couple dozen river miles with fewer than a few thousand individuals left, pressed by fungal disease, changing groundwater, and the fact that endangered-plant law does not protect plants on private land. The genus carries a famous footnote in medicine, too: the bark of yews yields taxol, the cell-dividing compound behind a major cancer drug, first synthesized by chemists working in nearby Tallahassee. All parts of the plant except the fleshy red aril are poisonous if eaten, so site the tree away from children and livestock.

In the garden, give Florida yew the conditions of the home ravines: cool, moist but well-drained, neutral to slightly alkaline soil, and the shelter of semi-shade out of hot afternoon sun. Use the plant as a rare evergreen understory shrub or small tree in a shaded woodland or collector's garden, and know that in growing so scarce a native, the gardener helps keep a critically endangered species alive. A rare and rarely offered conifer for the knowing grower.