What is the oldest tree in Kyoto?

The camphor at Imakumano Shrine, planted in 1160 by order of the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa and reportedly transplanted from the Kumano shrines in Wakayama. It is documented, unlike an older but harder-to-verify 1,200-year cedar in the hills northwest of the city.

Where is the best place to see old trees in Kyoto?

Kyoto Gyoen, the park around the old Imperial Palace. Eight trees on this list grow inside its walls and two more stand immediately beside them, close enough to cover in two walks of about a kilometre each, which makes it the one place in the city where several can be seen in an afternoon. Everywhere else they are spread thin across working temples and shrines: Kinkaku-ji, Yoshimine-dera, Daigo-ji and Nishi Honganji each hold one.

Are Kyoto's remarkable trees free to see?

Most are. Fourteen of the eighteen stand in free precincts: Kyoto Gyoen, Nashinoki Shrine, Goo Shrine, Nishi Honganji, Imakumano Shrine, Kamigamo Shrine and Maruyama Park. The other four stand inside temples that charge general admission, not a tree-specific fee.

Did any of Kyoto's remarkable trees start life as a bonsai?

Yes. The boat-shaped pine at Kinkaku-ji is said to have grown from a potted bonsai kept by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in the 14th century, later planted in the ground and trained into its current sailboat shape.

Japan

Alte Bäume in Kyoto

18 Bäume auf der Karte

Kyoto's remarkable trees rarely stand alone. They grow inside temple gardens and shrine precincts, shaped for centuries by monks, gardeners and shoguns who treated a living pine as seriously as any building. One was a shogun's bonsai before it was a tree. A camphor was planted in 1160 by imperial order and still grows where his workers put it. These are cultivated monuments, not wild survivors. The exception is Kyoto Gyoen, the walled park around the Imperial Palace, where nine grow inside or beside its walls, close enough to walk in two clusters of about a kilometre each.

Foto: PlusMinus (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Reclining Dragon Pine

Japanese White Pine (Pinus parviflora) · over 600 years · Oharano, Nishikyo-ku

This pine grows sideways, not up. Standing above the stone steps between Yoshimine-dera's main hall and its pagoda, the tree's trunk runs almost flat along a terrace rather than climbing skyward the way pines usually do, a five-needle pine trained or simply left to sprawl for over six centuries. A 19th century official, Hanayama's former minister Ieatsu, named it in 1857: Yuryu, the playing dragon, for the way its horizontal length resembles a dragon lounging on the ground. It once reached 50 metres end to end, long enough to rank as one of the longest documented pine specimens in Japan, until pine bark beetles infested it in 1994 and roughly 15 metres had to be cut away to save what remained. At its current 37 metres it is still one of the three trees Kyoto traditionally names as its most celebrated pines, and it remains a nationally designated natural monument, protected status Japan reserves for a small number of trees each century.