The Yamamomo of Renchakuji

Japan's largest recorded yamamomo makes a good part of its own fertiliser. Bayberries host nitrogen-fixing bacteria in nodules on their roots, which is how the species holds on in thin coastal soil, and this one has reached 7.2 metres round on a terrace above the Jogasaki cliffs. It is a female, 15 metres tall, the trunk splitting into three heavy limbs that carry a crown roughly 22 metres east to west and 18 north to south. Those are the figures taken when Japan made it a National Natural Monument in January 1999, and nobody appears to have measured it since. A tourism listing still described it in the present tense this year, which is reassuring rather than conclusive. Its age is the part nobody agrees on. The cautious sources say over 300 years. A local story says over a thousand and has the tree brought here from the grove around the mausoleum of Emperor Heizei. Nothing in the evidence settles it, so the honest answer is somewhere in that wide band, and if you know better, tell us. One thing it is not, whatever the archives suggest. This stretch of the Izu coast once held a designated bayberry colony at Tajima Village, and old maps of it circulate next to photographs of this tree. That colony was a separate designation and no longer exists. Renchakuji's bayberry is a single stock, standing on its own in temple grounds that are open at any hour.