The Inumaki of Kakuonji

This is the quietest place on this page and the hardest to get into. Kakuonji sits at the closed end of a valley in Nikaido, past where the tourist route gives up, and for most of the year the inner precinct is seen on a guided round at set times rather than wandered through. The inumaki in it is 18 metres tall, a Kamakura City Natural Monument and one of Kanagawa's hundred notable trees. Inumaki, Podocarpus macrophyllus, is a conifer that does not look like one: long flat strap-shaped leaves, dark and dense, and a fruit that is a green nut sitting on a swollen red stalk which is edible while the nut is not. It is the standard tree of a temple hedge in warm Japan and it takes clipping forever, so a free-grown one at 18 metres is a different object from the ones people know. The temple was founded in 1218 by the regent Hojo Yoshitoki after, the story goes, a dream, and it holds a hall of the twelve heavenly generals and a hillside of cave tombs cut into the valley walls. No age has been published for the tree.