The Great Camphor of Kamo

Its own town says this is the most beautiful tree in Japan, and makes the case on shape rather than size. The Great Camphor of Kamo stands alone in flat farmland on the north bank of the Yoshino River, and its crown spreads 52 metres east to west and 42 north to south, close enough to a perfect circle that the whole tree reads as one gesture. Nothing nearby competes with it for attention. By simple trunk girth it does not rank in Japan's top twenty. The trunk waists inward before flaring out again, buttressed and irregular rather than a clean cylinder, measuring 16.72 metres around by the government's own giant-tree method. What has never wavered is how the tree looks from a distance, which is why it became a Special Natural Monument in 1956, a tier Japan gives to only a small number of trees nationwide, thirty years after its first, lesser designation. It nearly lost that shape. Mid-century storms, lightning and encroaching farmland thinned a crown that once reached 70 metres across. From 1970 the town bought back the surrounding fields, replanted them and reopened them as a park, and the tree recovered: a 1988 survey measured its trunk at 13 metres round, a 2007 survey put it at nearly 17. Free to visit, a short walk from Awa-Kamo station, with nothing to see nearby but the tree itself and the river it has always stood beside.