Akatsu no Katsura

Japan made this katsura a national natural monument on 27 January 1941, and it has been getting smaller ever since. The record made at the designation describes a tree over 30 metres tall with a crown spreading about as wide. Typhoons have taken limbs since then and soil has washed out from under its roots, leaving 25 metres of height and a 20 metre spread. It is still one of the largest katsura in the country. The trunk measures 3.5 metres through at chest height, and at roughly 1.2 metres above the ground it stops pretending to be a single tree: fourteen stems, some huge and some slight, climb out of it from that point. Old katsura routinely do this. Very few do it on this scale. That 1941 survey is also the only reason anyone can say what the tree has lost. Its age is put at over 350 years, with nothing published about what the figure rests on, so read three and a half centuries as a floor rather than a verdict. If you know what dates it, tell us. It stands unfenced on a rural road toward Aizu-Nunobikiyama, west of Koriyama, with no station within reach. Our coordinates mark the area rather than the trunk, so expect a short hunt when you arrive.