L'If, aux frontières de la vie

The yew tree flirts with death. Everything in it is toxic. However, its strange way of growing, its capacity to replant and reinvent itself gives it a sense of immortality. The millenary yew trees fascinate us, but our relationship to this species has always been ambiguous, oscillating between veneration and destruction. It is true that, having found it to be the most precious companion, we have at the same time endangered the species, whereas it gives us the wood for our bows, or more recently biologists discover that it contains an extraordinarily efficient anti-cancer molecule, taxol. Then the yew tree becomes the "green gold", a « miracle » medicine, and suffers its worst deforestation ever! In forests, labs, bow shops ecologists, doctors and historians tell us the saga of this mythical tree, caught in the whirlwinds of science and modern economy.