The Reclining Dragon Pine

This pine grows sideways, not up. Standing above the stone steps between Yoshimine-dera's main hall and its pagoda, the tree's trunk runs almost flat along a terrace rather than climbing skyward the way pines usually do, a five-needle pine trained or simply left to sprawl for over six centuries. A 19th century official, Hanayama's former minister Ieatsu, named it in 1857: Yuryu, the playing dragon, for the way its horizontal length resembles a dragon lounging on the ground. It once reached 50 metres end to end, long enough to rank as one of the longest documented pine specimens in Japan, until pine bark beetles infested it in 1994 and roughly 15 metres had to be cut away to save what remained. At its current 37 metres it is still one of the three trees Kyoto traditionally names as its most celebrated pines, and it remains a nationally designated natural monument, protected status Japan reserves for a small number of trees each century.