The name is a small piece of botanical honesty: podos, a foot, and karpos, a fruit. What looks like a berry on a podocarp is no fruit at all, but a naked seed carried on a swollen, brightly colored fleshy stalk, and the old Greek compound describes the arrangement better than anything the nursery trade has managed since. Yew pine is the usual name across the American South, which manages to be wrong twice over. These plants are neither yews nor pines.

What they are is older than both. The Podocarpaceae are a Gondwanan family, the great conifer lineage of the Southern Hemisphere, still centered on Chile, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the southern Andes, with a handful of species that drifted north into Asia. Set beside a spruce or a fir the podocarps look almost broadleaved: flat, strap-shaped leaves held in dense spirals along the stem, and at a distance the effect is a soft, deep, near-textureless green that reads more like a wall of yew than anything you would call a conifer.

In Southern gardens the workhorse is Podocarpus macrophyllus, native to southern China, Taiwan, and Japan, where the tree is kusamaki and a fixture of temple planting. Few evergreens take shearing so obligingly, which is how yew pine became the default clipped hedge of the Gulf Coast a century ago. Left unpruned, the same plant builds a fine loose column to twenty feet and more. Drought tolerant once settled, notably untroubled by salt, and hardy through zone 7 given the sharp drainage this genus insists on everywhere.

The rarer species are the reason a collector reads this far. Podocarpus parlatorei, the pino del cerro, holds isolated ridges in the Yungas cloud forest on the eastern flank of the Andes in Bolivia and northwestern Argentina, and carries real conservation interest. Podocarpus acutifolius comes from the South Island of New Zealand, finely built and sharply needle-tipped, a plant we have seldom been able to offer at all.

Two honest cautions come with the genus. Podocarps are dioecious, so fruit wants a female plant with a male within reach; on a female the ripe receptacle swells purple and draws birds through the autumn. The seed sitting atop that fleshy stalk is toxic, however, and while the receptacle is eaten in parts of Asia, this is not a plant to graze absent-mindedly or to site where small children pick things up. Give sun to light shade, sharp drainage, and patience: growth is steady rather than quick, which is exactly why a well-grown podocarp hedge still looks right forty years on. Find more evergreen structure among our Conifers, and the rest of the screening plants in Large Shrubs.