The Hackberry of Shinjo-no-miya Shrine

The national register that catalogues this tree keeps a field for a local nickname. Beside the two camphors on the same grounds it is filled in. Beside this one it reads: none. That is the only modest thing about it. The 2000 giant-tree survey recorded an enoki, the Chinese hackberry, with a trunk 4.82 metres round and a crown at 26 metres, health good. By the register's own figures that puts it three metres above the celebrated wife camphor on the same grounds, and nobody has ever given it a name for the trouble. It is part of the shrine's wood rather than a specimen planted in front of it. The prefecture's encyclopedia of Hiroshima, describing that wood, lists enoki among its broadleaves alongside zelkova, mukunoki and mukuroji, though it names no individual tree and publishes no measurements. Two sources for the species and the grove, then, and one for the tape. The wood grows on ground the city has formally recorded: the shrine's main hall, 2.9 kilometres from the hypocentre, is one of Hiroshima's listed hibaku kenzobutsu, the buildings that were still standing after the atomic bomb. The hackberry's age has never been documented. The register left the band empty and no second source fills it, so if you know anything about when it went in, tell us.