Kitahanazawa no Hananoki

This maple has lost two trunks to storms and is standing on what was left over. It forked near the base originally. One limb broke in a storm in 1866, the other went down in Typhoon Jane in 1950, and the tree today divides into six limbs about three metres up. It is a hananoki, Acer pycnanthum, and together with its companion 600 metres south at Minamihanazawa it is one of the two westernmost naturally occurring specimens known in Japan. The pair were designated National Natural Monuments together on 3 March 1921, in the same order, and they still read as a pair: a ten minute bus from Yokaichi Station reaches both, and the walk between them is about ten minutes more. The numbers: 4.9 metres round at the base, 2.8 at chest height, 17.27 metres tall. Japanese Wikipedia estimates it at over 300 years, which would have it already grown when the first of those two storms took a trunk off it. Hananoki means flower tree. In early spring the red flowers open on bare wood, before any leaf, and the crown turns red before it turns green. The rest of the year it looks like an ordinary maple standing above a small Shiga hamlet, which is a fair share of the appeal: this is a nationally protected tree with no gate, no ticket and usually nobody else there.