The Weeping Cherry of Jochiji

Jochiji flowers before the rest of Kamakura does. The tachihigan, the upright form of the higan cherry, opens a good week or more ahead of the somei-yoshino that everyone else waits for, and the one here is 20 metres tall, a Kamakura City Natural Monument and on Kanagawa's list of a hundred notable trees. Higan cherries are the long-lived ones. Almost every famous old cherry in Japan is this species or a form of it, because somei-yoshino is a nineteenth century clone that rarely passes a century, while a higan can run to several. Jochiji sits in a narrow valley off the Kita-Kamakura road, entered by a stone bridge and a flight of worn steps beside a well that is one of Kamakura's ten. It was founded in 1281 for a Hojo who died at 29, and it was ranked fourth of the five great Zen temples, though what stands now is mostly twentieth century: the Kanto earthquake of 1923 flattened the buildings here. The cherry has no published age, which is a pity for a species where age is the point. If you know one, tell us.