The Ginkgo of Tomohiro Shrine

The 1943 flood carried off the shrine's torii gate. The ginkgo standing behind it did not move, and the gate took sixty-nine years to come back: the replacement went up only in 2012. Tomohiro Shrine sits on low ground in Nakajima, boxed in by the Ota, Nenotani and Misasa rivers, in an area with a long history of flooding. The Chugoku Shimbun, Hiroshima's own paper, went out to profile the tree for coming through that one intact. The city counts it among Hiroshima's three major ginkgo trees and made it a designated natural monument in April 1995. The measurements disagree slightly, and the reason is mundane: the city records a girth of 415cm at chest height, the Environment Ministry's giant-tree register 419cm, taken on a different day by different hands. Both put it around 25 metres tall, with limbs reaching almost ten metres out to the north. The register's 2000 survey placed it in the 200 to 299 year band, which makes it somewhere between 225 and 325 years old now. It is a male tree, so late November brings the gold without the fallen fruit that gives ginkgo pavements their reputation. Eight minutes on foot from Nakashima Station, and the gate you walk under is younger than almost everyone walking under it.