Its main limb leaves the trunk at a slant and keeps going, out across the road, until it hangs over the cars parked on the other side. Almost everything else about this camphor is an open question. Kagoshima keeps a register of 38 preserved trees, each measured and given a signboard at its foot. This one is not on it. It stands at the edge of a car park below Shiroyama, the hill above the city that has been a national natural monument and historic site since 1931, about 250 metres from the Camphor of Shiroyama on the forest path. None of the writing about Shiroyama that we found names it. What one visit shows: a massive trunk rising out of a raised concrete bed beside a small building, a crown that was full and green in October 2026, and ferns growing along the leaning limb. The species is read from the leaves, the bark and the shape of the tree rather than from any record, and nobody has published a name, a girth, a height or an age for it. That makes it a tree you can help put on the record. If you are standing under it, a tape round the trunk at chest height would give it its first measurement. If there is a plaque at the base, or a name the neighbourhood uses for it, or you know when it was planted, tell us and this page will carry it.
small cream flowers, and the crushed leaf smells of camphorFruit
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
新照院町, Kagoshima (car park below Shiroyama, about 250 m from the Camphor of Shiroyama) You can recognise it by the main limb, which leans out from a raised concrete bed beside a small building and arches right across the road over the parked cars. It stands at the car park's edge, not on the forest path.
Free; it stands at the edge of a public car park beside a small building, its main limb arching over the road and parking area. Visible from the car park.
In central Kagoshima: a local bus to Shiroyama, then on foot; about 250 metres from the Camphor of Shiroyama.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- Visit on 2026-09-25: photograph and GPS fix at the trunk; no register or article names this tree
