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Taxus wallichiana
Also called East Himalayan Yew, Taiwan Yew
Himalayan yew is a slow-growing evergreen conifer native to the Himalayas and parts of southeast Asia, grown mainly as an ornamental or in gardens where its needles are not eaten. It is endangered in the wild and is valued in medicine as a source of taxol precursors.
Taxus wallichiana, the Himalayan yew, is a species of yew, native to the Himalaya and parts of south-east Asia. The species has a variety of uses in traditional medicine. It is currently classified as endangered by the IUCN.
The species favours a reasonably wide range of habitats, growing in montane, temperate, warm temperate, and tropical submontane to high montane forests which may be deciduous, evergreen, or of mixed character. In forests, it tends to present as a low canopy tree; in open situations it usually forms a large, broadly spreading shrub. Elevation ranges from 900 to 3,700 m (3,000 to 12,100 ft).
The tree has medicinal use in Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine. Taxus wallichiana is also a source of the chemical precursors to the anticancer drug paclitaxel (taxol). Taxus wallichiana is used for making tea by the Bhotiya tribal community in the Garhwal Himalaya. The stem bark of this species, which is locally known as thuner, is collected for this purpose. This species is also used as fuelwood by the local communities. In Himachal it is known to be medicine for some types of cancer. A high-quality phased genome of T. wallichiana has been sequenced, and collinearity analysis between it and other closely related species to gymnosperms has helped provide evidence explaining why Taxus species are the only plants providing a large-scale source of paclitaxel. Helping identify and annotate several CYP450 genes involved in the paclitaxel biosynthetic pathway.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Taxus wallichiana by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
Pet safety from the ASPCA toxic and non-toxic plant lists.
