Ishito no Kaba-zakura

There is exactly one of these trees in the world. Kaba-zakura is a natural hybrid between two common Japanese cherry species, Edo Higan and Yamazakura, and this cross happened once, in the wild, at some point in the medieval period, and has never been found or bred again anywhere else. Legend credits the planting to Minamoto no Noriyori, a 12th-century warrior nicknamed Kaba no Kanja, which is where the tree gets its name. It nearly did not survive to be studied. The tree once had four trunks, but decades of soil compaction and the weight of ten stone memorial tablets placed at its roots reduced it to one by the 1960s and 70s. After the tablets were finally removed in 1973, the tree stopped flowering altogether for ten years. It bloomed again in 1977, and the city of Kitamoto has been actively treating the soil with liquid fertiliser since 2004, expanding the protected ground around it as recently as 2022 by buying the neighbouring plot outright. It has held National Natural Monument status since 1922 and is counted among Japan's Five Great Cherry Trees. In April 2023, on the temple grounds at Tokoji, it bloomed for its own hundredth anniversary as a designated monument, drawing crowds who came to see a hybrid nobody has ever managed to grow a second copy of.