At the right you see two yew "fruits" which are about the size of small peas.  I've removed part of one side of the top "fruit" so you can see that the green item in it resides there like a ball in a red bowl. In the bottom "fruit" you can see the very top of the green item peeking from a hole in the bowl-like thing, which is soft and juicy. Clearly, this is unlike most fruits, so what's going on, and why do I keep putting the word "fruit" inside quotation marks? To understand, we have to think botanically.

On our Gymnosperm Page we say this about gymnosperm fruits:

Their female sex germs reside in ovules, as in regular flowers, but the ovules themselves are not enclosed within the flower's ovaries, as they are among flowering plants. (Thus the ovules are "naked," and we're reminded that gymnosperms are not flowering plants.)

On our Fruit Page we define a fruit as:

The ripened ovary of a seed plant, and its contents, as the pod of a pea, a nut, grain, berry, etc. (Thus ovaries become fruits, while ovules become seeds.)

So, the gymnosperm definition says that gymnosperm ovules are not enclosed in ovaries -- the ovule is presented naked on a stem -- and our fruit definition says that fruits develop from ovaries. Does this mean, then, that the yews' juicy, red items can't be real fruits?

Well, according to our strict definitions of what a fruit is, that's exactly what it means. The Yews' juicy, red items are false fruits because they don't develop from ovaries. People often talk about "Yew fruits" the same way that they refer to tomatoes as vegetables, though, botanically, we've seen, tomatoes are perfectly good fruits developed directly from tomato-flower ovaries. Here we're being technical and technically yews produce false fruits with naked seeds not surrounding by the matter of matured ovaries. The juicy, red material in the above picture did not develop from the yew flower's ovary.

Here's what we're seeing in the picture above:

The greenish item inside the juicy, red thing is the seed. When the seed matures more it'll grow darker. In the picture it's green because it's still a bit immature.

The red, juicy, bowl-like thing surrounding the seed is an aril. An aril is a fleshy covering found on certain kinds of seeds. Arils develop from the funiculus, which is the attachment point of the seed to the rest of the plant. Note that the funiculus is not part of the ovary but rather something else entirely. Technically, the yew's aril is considered to have evolved from a primitive cone scale.