The Great Cycad of Shinmachi

Four thick branches run along the ground from this cycad's base like the arms of something reaching rather than growing, described in Japanese sources as looking like a giant snake writhing. A central trunk rises about ten metres, unusually tall for a cycad, and the whole clump measures 7.76 metres around at the base, not a single trunk's girth but the combined mass of stem and limbs together. Tradition places its age anywhere from six hundred to over a thousand years, tied to a story that the tree was already a splendid giant when O-Man, later a consort of Tokugawa Ieyasu and mother of the founders of the Kii and Mito Tokugawa branches, was born on this plot before 1607 to the Masaki family who owned the land. A fire damaged its eastern side in 1916; it recovered, and became a National Natural Monument in 1936, one of only ten individually designated cycads in the whole of Japan. Emperor Showa and Empress Kojun came to see it in June 1981. Its vigour has declined somewhat in recent years, which the record should say plainly rather than smooth over. It stands a few minutes' walk from Kawazu Station, beside the Odoriko Onsen Kaikan bathhouse and about six hundred metres from the Great Camphor already mapped here, free to see, once a private garden and now a public plot.