Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 19, 1991                   TAG: 9102190039
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

OH, HOW I WISH YEWS WERE HERE

Not youze. Youze are what Yankees call y'all, as in "Youze goin' to duh bawlgame, aw what?"

Youze I don't miss. I never liked youze much, to be frank.

Yews are shrubbery. They're always green. Female yews grow red berries, which can be crushed to a mock-blood pulp inside a coffee can and flung at other people - preferably girls - with sticks.

Lads crave yews for yews' berries.

Grown men, who need coffee cans to soak paint brushes in paint thinner, yearn for yews to hide the foundations of their homes. A hidden foundation never needs a fresh coat of paint, which means fewer coffee cans. It ties together. You figure it out.

But yews are harder to come by here in Virginia than in other places where I have hidden foundations. I will not mention other states in which I have lived, because each time I do, distraught women call me to wail about menfolk who died in combat in 1862, as if it were just yesterday and they are now widowed.

In these other states, populated by Yankees, yews are ubiquitous. Every time you fall off a porch up north, you drop into yews' needles.

Youze use fewer yews here. More boxwoods.

Now, before I tell you the truth about boxwoods, let me commend Virginians on their dogwoods and their azaleas. Dogwoods are lovely trees - short and gnarled and scaly, they look like something that would grow near the summit of a Mongolian mountain or in a bonsai garden. They make a decent red berry, too. Fine trees, dogwoods.

Why, just last weekend, I toasted my tootsies near a fire stoked with dogwood logs. I chopped down the only dogwood tree in my yard in a rage when it dropped its leaves and I had to rake. Before you send me an angry letter, let me stand before you ashamedly and admit that I'm lying. I didn't chop it. I sawed it.

Azaleas are lovely, too, such shrubby mirrors of human fickleness. Azaleas can never decide until the last minute whether they should drop their leaves during the winter or hang on. They end up looking scraggly.

They make for lousy fires, but azaleas redeem themselves with stunning flowers. The blooms, still six weeks away, are lovely until that one last, late, inevitable frost turns them black and the plants look like they're flecked with roof tar.

Dogwoods burn well. Azaleas bloom.

What do boxwoods do?

They offer affordable housing to heinous insects, for one. Prolific web-weaving caterpillars love boxwoods. Every boxwood looks like a clothesline for lingerie, but on close inspection those panties are nothing more than gross webs. And in summer, squadrons of nostril-seeking gnats swarm from brushed boxwoods.

Boxwoods smell sour. Dogs love to mark their territory on the lower branches. One slip of the pruning shears on a boxwood's pate and you'll see the nick for generations.

Boxwoods are the shrub of choice around here, though.

I ripped out some giant, old boxwoods last year and planted on their graves some spindly euonymus. Anonymous euonymus, a shrub named for a local department store.

But I still think of yews. I think a lot of yews.