The Hackberry of Nashinoki Shrine

One document describes this tree, and it is a list of measurements. Kamigyo Ward records the hackberry at Nashinoki Shrine as 21 metres tall, with a trunk 3.72 metres around and a canopy spreading 19.4 metres, and designates it one of the ward's pride trees. No source gives it an age, and nothing else written about the shrine mentions it. Worth knowing before you arrive: the tree Nashinoki is locally known for is a different one, a katsura that carries a nickname and a following of its own. The hackberry has neither. What it has is size and a position, on Teramachi-dori directly against Kyoto Gyoen's east wall, about 850 metres from the camphor at Munakata Shrine, which costs a visitor almost nothing to add to a loop of the park. The shrine is young by Kyoto standards. It was founded in 1885 for Sanjo Sanetomi, the court noble who fled the capital with six others in 1863 on the losing side of a factional purge, spent years in exile in Choshu, and came back to serve as chancellor of the Meiji state. The precinct that went up for him is small, walled and quiet, which is a plausible explanation for how a tree of this size has been left alone a few metres from the traffic on Teramachi-dori.