Iida maps two cherries, both centuries old and both flowering within days of each other each spring. The Yasutomi Cherry, over 450 years old, carries a twenty metre crown on five broom-like limbs with no supports, in the art museum grounds. Two kilometres south on the old Enshu Kaido, the Weeping Cherry of Kega-kuyoto pours down a roadside embankment, its trunk 3.8 metres round beside two stone lanterns and a shrine marker. Neither tree has a documented planting date; both are kept going by neighbours rather than a museum staff.
0 of 2 visited in Iida
Edo Higan Cherry (Prunus itosakura, syn. Prunus pendula f. ascendens) · 450 years · Otemachi, Iida
Japan's oldest cherries tend to end their days on timber props. This one is over 450 years old, twenty metres tall, and carries the whole crown unaided, which is the first thing both records of it reach for.
About three metres up, the trunk divides into five major limbs spread like the head of a broom, and the entire crown rides on them. The trunk below is 5.4 metres round. Nagano Prefecture made it a prefectural natural monument on 22 May 1967.
Its formal name is Osahime no Edohigan. Nobody uses it. The tree is the Yasutomi cherry, after the family who lived here: the Yasutomi were karo, chief retainers to the Hori clan who held the Iida domain, and this was their residence ground. The residence has gone, the domain has gone, and the Iida City Art Museum stands on the site with the cherry in its grounds, free to walk up to.
Higan is the equinox, and that is roughly when the tree opens: in Iida, the final days of March running into early April. The city publishes a bloom tracker through the season and lights the tree after dark for as long as it holds its flowers.
Cherry (Prunus sp.) · 350 years · Kega, Iida
The tree is named for something that is no longer there. Kuyoto means a memorial tower, and one is said to have stood on this spot on the old Enshu Kaido, the highway running south out of Iida. The tower went. The name stayed, and so did the place names on the slope beside it, which date from the Sengoku wars.
What stands there now is a weeping cherry fifteen metres tall with a trunk 3.8 metres round, its branches falling down the roadside embankment rather than out across the road. Iida made it a municipal natural monument on 22 November 2000. The city and an independent Nagano travel writer both put it at roughly 350 years, and tradition holds that people living here planted it while the Wakisaka clan held Iida Castle, between 1617 and 1672. That is a story kept locally rather than a record in an archive. It fits the age without proving it.
Neighbours still look after the tree, along with two stone lanterns and an Akiba Shrine marker, and they keep a lamp burning there. In blossom season it is lit at night.
Two things we do not know. Neither source gives a coordinate for the trunk, so our pin marks Kega Station, about ten minutes' walk away. And neither names the cultivar, only shidarezakura, weeping cherry. If you can settle either, tell us.