Busan's two mapped trees both carry South Korea's national Natural Monument designation. The Busanjin Crape Myrtles in Yangjeong-dong are counted as one monument, a pair whose original trunks rotted away long ago; what stands now is a cluster of stems that grew on from the old rootstock. The Suyeong Fortress Gomsol, a coastal black pine inside the walls of a seventeenth-century naval garrison, is where local tradition says sailors once prayed for a safe return. Both stand on public ground inside ordinary city parks, free to visit.
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The Busanjin Crape Myrtles (Yangjeong-dong)
Crape Myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) · roughly 800 years (traditional dating) · Yangjeong-dong
These two trees are one national monument, and at least one of them has outlived its own trunk. The original stem rotted away long ago and what stands today grew on from the edges of it, which is how a crape myrtle carries on: not one trunk but a cluster of smooth, sinuous stems rising off old rootstock. South Korea designated the pair together on 7 April 1965 as Natural Monument No. 168, quantity two.
They stand on either side of the tomb of Jeong Mun-do, founder of the Dongnae Jeong clan, at the Jeongmyosa shrine in Hwaji Park. By the clan's own tradition one was planted on each side of the grave in the Goryeo period, which put them at roughly 800 years old when the state listed them and nearer 860 now. That is a genealogical date carried down by the family who still manage the site, not a measured one, and it is best held loosely.
The taller of the two reaches 8.3 metres. Nobody has recorded a girth, which for stems like these is understandable; there is no obvious place to put a tape.
Come in the heat. From late July into mid-August both trees carry red flower over a shrine that is quiet the rest of the year. It is an ancestral grave as well as a park, so walk it accordingly.
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The Suyeong Fortress Gomsol (Black Pine)
Japanese Black Pine (Pinus thunbergii) · roughly 400 years · Suyeong-dong
Local tradition holds that the sailors of the Joseon naval garrison prayed to this pine for a safe return. The fortress they served in, Suyeongseong, is now a public park with a seventeenth-century gate and a row of war memorials, and the tree stands inside it.
It is a gomsol, the coastal black pine Koreans also call haesong, and it is built like one: 23.6 metres tall, 4.5 metres round, and seven full metres of clean trunk before the first branch. South Korea made it Natural Monument No. 270 in November 1982.
The age given locally is roughly 400 years, a figure that comes from interpretive material rather than from a ring count or a growth-rate calculation, so it is a band rather than a number. It is worth saying what that band implies, because the setting invites the opposite assumption: this pine was almost certainly not standing for the Imjin War of the 1590s, the war the memorials beneath it commemorate. It grew up afterwards, in a garrison town putting itself back together, and outlasted the garrison, the fortress walls and the navy that manned them.
A citizen reporter who visited in 2026 found it well kept and in good health. The park around it is free and unremarkable, which is most of the charm: a national monument standing where people cut through on the way home.
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