Podocarpus macrophyllus yew pine

Podocarpus macrophyllus at Durand Building. Sairus Patel, 19 Jan 2023

Podocarpus macrophyllus cones. John Rawlings, ca. 2005

An upright, narrow conifer with 2–4 inch leaves, about ½ inch wide, distinctly paler green beneath on mature growth. The warm brownish-gray bark is finely fibrous.

One common name is Buddhist pine, a nod to centuries of planting in China and Japan around temples and shrines. The Japanese call it kusamaki. Formerly classified among the yews as Taxus macrophylla, it can be forgiven the “yew” in the long-standing name yew pine. Macrophyllus, or large-leaf, remains an apt epithet even after its transfer to Podocarpus; indeed, if one wished for a name that dispensed with the unfortunate “pine” altogether, bigleaf podocarp would be perfectly serviceable.

A tall, columnar male, with short catkin-like pollen cones, grows on the north side of the Durand Building near the staircase. A smaller male, clothed in leaves almost to the ground, is on the right of the cut-through path south of 736 Mayfield Avenue. Two others, at least one male, are set against the right corner of the building at 801 Welch Road. Female trees bearing the distinctive fleshy two-part cone remain to be found.

The smaller and finer-leaved var. maki, the shrubby yew pine, once formed a hedge in the Science and Engineering Quad near the olives.

See, too, the drooping leaves of a pair of the similar P. henkelii at 2349 Dartmouth Street in Palo Alto, at the fence on the California Avenue side, next to a row of Afrocarpus falcatus, with which it can be compared. On campus, a young one is tucked into the entryway plantings of the small house on Lane B opposite Bolivar House.