What is the oldest tree in Ichinohe?
Ichinohe's oldest mapped tree is the Wisteria of Fujishima (Wisteria floribunda, Noda wisteria), a National Natural Monument several hundred years old, standing beside Kozuya Elementary School in Ichinohe, Iwate Prefecture. A second National Natural Monument, a fruiting male ginkgo at Jissoji Temple roughly six kilometres away, is estimated at around 320 years.
Seven wisteria and one other vine have ever been given Japan's National Natural Monument status, and this is the northernmost of them, designated in 1938. The name Fujishima, wisteria island, comes from a moat that once ran on three sides. At designation it was reportedly the largest wisteria in Japan, but a 1954 typhoon felled its main stem, and it has grown supported on a steel trellis since; a 1995 reference records the trunk as internally rotted and split into seven pieces, though the wood under the bark is healthy and its overall vigour is good. A 1969 survey put the root circumference at 3.6 metres, other accounts round to 3.3 or 4, and its growth is said to reach past 20 metres. Its age is given only loosely, several hundred years, one account saying over 400, repeated here as vaguely as given. Schoolchildren next door take part in its conservation, a 2022 newspaper report found it in good bloom that May, and every year on the last Sunday of May the town holds a Wisteria Festival with night illumination. Free, on a signposted site with a small Benzaiten shrine at its base.
One of Ichinohe's trees also appears in The Autumn Harvest.