The Ginkgo of Kushida Shrine

A 1913 stone monument at the foot of this ginkgo already declared it over a thousand years old, and the monument itself is now old enough to be doubted along with the tree. A later measurement of its trunk put the real figure closer to 600 years, which barely dents the point: this is Hakata's most sung-about tree, its own line in the centuries-old Hakata Iwai Uta, the toast still performed at weddings and shop openings across the district. It stands beside the starting point of the Gion Yamakasa festival, so its crown has watched every decorated float lurch past below it every July for generations. Age has not been gentle underneath the show: the lower trunk is hollow and decayed, several major limbs have been cut back hard, and metal rings and props now hold up what canopy remains. None of that stops it turning, every November, into a single dense cone of butter-gold leaves that the whole neighbourhood times its photographs around. A female tree, it drops fruit by the bagful onto the shrine's stone paving each autumn, pollinated by male ginkgoes it cannot see from streets away.