Ushijima no Fuji (the Great Wisteria of Ushijima)

Japan protects exactly one wisteria at its highest heritage rank, and this is it. The garden around it exists for no other reason: the plant came first and everything else was built to receive the people who come to look at it, for about three weeks a year. Its age is given as roughly 1,200 years by the garden, by Tobu Railway and across Japanese travel writing, with a wide band underneath that figure, somewhere between a thousand and thirteen hundred years. One Japanese source goes further and calls it the oldest of its species in the country. Nobody else does, so take that as a claim rather than a fact. The base of the plant is over four metres round, and the trellis it has been trained across covers between 600 and 700 square metres depending on who measured it and when. What people come for is the flower. The clusters hang up to two metres long, among the longest any Japanese wisteria produces, in a pale violet ceiling you stand underneath rather than look at. It was made a National Natural Monument in January 1928 and raised to Special Natural Monument in August 1955. Plan around the bloom or do not go at all: in 2025 the garden opened on 12 April and closed on 4 May, and it is shut the rest of the year.