Brian, I don't think you're crazy, but I'm not sure what that says about me :) About 10 years ago I had a whole slew of them you could have had (if you wanted to drive 2 hours each way), but that doesn't help you now. Have you tried things like craigslist.com? We've had amazing results getting rid of stuff that way and have seen some pretty odd requests; yours might have a bigger audience there. I find it hard to believe that someone doesn't have some yews they'd be happy to get rid of, they've been so widely planted (and overplanted). But an awful lot of people fight them by pruning/shearing often so maybe that's the limiting factor. Anyway, good luck!

I don't think you're crazy at all, because I often drive down a street in my town where there are several rental houses that were once obviously nice, and have some nice big shurbs, but have not been kept up. One has two big old yews in the front, and when I go by I often think that if I offered them some money to dig those up and take them home, they'd probably say yes.

After all, they've let the properties go to pot because they don't want to spend a dime on maintaining them, and they'd probably jump at the chance to make a quick buck by selling the plants. Maybe if you contacted some property management companies, or someone who owns older rental properties, you could find some nice old yews that would probably be happy to have a new home. I know I've heard of people who own rental properties taking out nice architectural details like French doors and selling them, so why not plants?