The Weeping Cherry of Gion

The tree everyone photographs at Maruyama Park is not the tree that made the spot famous. The original weeping cherry, a single white higan variety with a trunk 4 metres around, stood here for more than 200 years and earned natural monument status in 1938, only to die in 1947 in the difficult years after the war. Sano Toemon XV, a cherry tree keeper from a family that has tended Kyoto's most important specimens for generations, had collected seeds from the dying original in 1928 and grew a successor, which he donated and planted on the same spot in 1949. That second tree is the one visitors see today, floodlit most nights during bloom season into a canopy of pale pink against the dark, one of the most photographed single trees in Japan. Sources differ on exactly how old to call it, some counting from the 1949 planting and others from the 1928 seed collection, a small discrepancy left honest here rather than resolved into a false precision. Either way, the tree standing in Maruyama Park today has been growing for the better part of a century, not the two hundred years its predecessor reached.