The Tabu Tree of Ato Myojin Shrine

Somebody measured this tree twice, twenty six years apart, and in between it had put on eleven centimetres. The first figure, 3.62 metres round, sits in the 1974 papers that made the grove at Ato Myojin Shrine a Hiroshima City natural monument. That listing covers the whole stand rather than any single trunk, and names this laurel in its description as the representative large tree of the area. The second figure, 3.73 metres, comes from the Environment Ministry's national survey of giant trees, which reached the precinct in 2000 and recorded it in good health. It is a tabunoki, the broad evergreen laurel that fills the warm coastal forests of western Japan and turns up on shrine ground all over the region, keeping its gloss through the winter. It has a cedar of almost exactly its own size for company a few steps away, and two smaller umbrella pines behind that. Shrine tradition puts the foundation at 852 and records a reorganisation in 1837, when the old Ato Myojin was merged with a Hachiman shrine. What nobody has recorded is the tree's age. Various trees here are said to have gone in around that 1837 rebuilding, but no source ties this one to it, so the honest answer is that we do not know. The registers give its waist and its health and stop. If you know when it went in, tell us.