The Ohatsuki Ginkgo of Jotakuji Temple

On the night of 30 September 2018, Typhoon Trami snapped this ginkgo off near its base and laid the whole tree flat on the ground at Jotakuji Temple. The temple left it exactly where it fell rather than clearing it away, and within a year new shoots were pushing out of the fallen trunk. It has fruited from the ground every autumn since. Locals now call it Yokobushi no Oh-Icho, the great fallen ginkgo, and the town still tracks its condition on its own website today. This is not an ordinary ginkgo. It is an Ohatsuki variant, in which roughly a third of the seeds grow fused to the edge of a leaf instead of hanging free, a mutation first described to Japanese science from this exact tree in 1891. Only seven trees of this kind carry national Natural Monument status, designated in 1929, and three of the seven stand within a couple of kilometres of each other in this one district of Minobu. Local legend explains the ground rather than the species: a Nichiren-sect priest is said to have planted his teacher's walking staff, cut from ginkgo wood, over the grave of a dog that once took poison meant for him, and the staff took root. Whatever actually planted it, something here has kept it fruiting for roughly 750 years, upright for most of them and, since 2018, flat on its side.