The Wisteria of Fujishima

Seven wisteria and one other vine have ever been given Japan's National Natural Monument status, the country's highest tier of tree protection, and this is the northernmost of them. The name Fujishima, wisteria island, comes from a moat that used to run on three sides of the site, before it was filled in. At its 1938 designation this was reportedly the largest wisteria in Japan. It has not had an easy run since. A 1954 typhoon felled its main stem, and it has grown supported on a steel trellis ever since; a 1995 reference book records the trunk as internally rotted and split into seven separate pieces, though the wood just under the bark is described as healthy and the tree's overall vigour as good. Sources vary on its exact size, which is itself evidence of how hard this tree is to measure: a 1969 survey put the root circumference at 3.6 metres, other accounts round to 3.3 or 4, and its supported growth is said to reach past 20 metres. Its age gets the same treatment, several hundred years, one account says over 400, repeated here as loosely as the sources give it. What is certain is that it is tended rather than merely preserved. Schoolchildren from the elementary school next door take part in its conservation programme, 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 beneath it.