The Wife Camphor of Shinjo-no-miya Shrine

Every published account of these two camphors calls them a matched pair, both around 30 metres tall. The people who came with a tape found something else. Surveying the trees one by one in 2000, the national giant-tree register put the husband at 35 metres and this tree, Onna-gusu, the wife, at 23. The girths run the same way: 5.4 metres here against 6.4 next door. The prefecture's encyclopedia of Hiroshima publishes 5.5 metres for this trunk, close enough to be the same measurement in a different hand, but the heights have never been reconciled and both sets of figures stand. None of that makes it a small tree. The same survey recorded its health as good, and a 5.4 metre trunk holds its own beside anything else in the grove. The two camphors and the grove around them are a designated natural monument, prefectural by the encyclopedia's account and municipal by the code on the national register. The ground it stands on carries a formal record of its own. The shrine's main hall is 2.9 kilometres from the hypocentre and appears on Hiroshima's official list of hibaku kenzobutsu, the buildings left standing after the atomic bomb. The age of this camphor has never been established and the register leaves the field blank. If somebody has a planting date, or a shrine record that gives one, we would like to hear it.