Seicho-zakura

In January 2008 this cherry was picked up by crane, root ball and all, and set back down about thirty metres away. It stood eight metres tall and the ball weighed roughly three and a half tonnes. The reason it was moved rather than felled is a detective novel. The tree grew on the grounds of the old Nishitetsu-Kashii station, the area Matsumoto Seicho used as the setting for Ten to Sen, his 1958 novel. When the line was lifted onto a viaduct in 2006 and the old station came down, his readers organised. The Matsumoto Seicho society, a non-profit of fans, petitioned Fukuoka City and the Nishitetsu railway to keep the tree, and on 21 January 2008 it was transplanted whole to the forecourt of the new station, beside a stone monument to the book. The arborist who supervised the move reckoned it had another twenty or thirty years of flowering in it with proper care, which takes it into the 2040s. Nobody has recorded its age. The sources call it simply an old tree, and none of them names the cultivar either, so if you know your cherries and you are standing in front of it, tell us which one this is. It is not the oldest tree in Fukuoka, or the biggest, or the strangest. It is the one a few hundred readers refused to let go of, and it flowers every spring over a commuter forecourt because of that.