Taxus brevifolia, the Pacific yew or western yew, is a species of tree in the yew family Taxaceae native to the Pacific Northwest of North America. It is a small evergreen conifer, thriving in moisture and otherwise tending to take the form of a shrub. Description A small evergreen conifer (sometimes appearing as a shrub), the Pacific yew grows to tall and with a trunk up to diameter, rarely more. In some instances, trees with heights in excess of occur in parks and other protected areas, quite often in gullies. The tree is extremely slow growing, and has a habit of rotting from the inside, creating hollow forms. This makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to make accurate ring counts to determine a specimen's true age. Often damaged by succession of the forest, it usually ends up in a squat, multiple-leader form, able to grow new sprouts from decapitated stumps. In its shrub form, sometimes called "yew brush", it can reproduce vegetatively via layering. It has thin, scaly bark, red then purplish-brown, covering a thin layer of off-white sap wood with a darker heartwood that varies in color from brown to a purplish hue to deep red, or even bright orange when freshly cut. The leaves are lanceolate, flat, dark green, long and broad, arranged spirally on the stem, but with the leaf bases twisted to align the leaves in two flat rows either side of the stem except on erect leading shoots where the spiral arrangement is more obvious. The seed cones are highly modified, each cone containing a single seed long partly surrounded by a modified scale which develops into a soft, bright red berry-like structure called an aril, long and wide and open at the end. The arils are mature 6–9 months after pollination. The seeds contained in the arils are eaten by thrushes and other birds, which disperse the hard seeds undamaged in their droppings; maturation of the arils is spread over 2–3 months, increasing the chances of successful seed dispersal. The male cones are globose, diameter, and shed their pollen in early spring. It is mostly dioecious, but occasional individuals can be variably monoecious, or change sex with time. Varieties Taxus brevifolia var. reptaneta is a shrub variety that generally occurs in the mid to upper elevation range of the typical variety, at its southernmost occurrence in the Klamath Mountains region, and at lower elevations