The Great Zelkova of Mitsue

It looks like two trees leaning together. It is one, and the space between them is where lightning burned out its heart. The Great Zelkova of Mitsue is counted among the Three Great Zelkovas of Japan, with Haramachi's in Gunma and Higashine's in Yamagata. A lightning fire hollowed and destroyed the central core long ago, leaving a trunk that reads as a pair from any distance; the base settles it as one tree. Around that trunk at chest height the national heritage database and the city's own page both give about 14.2 to 14.35 metres. An older source says 14.7. At the roots it swells to roughly 17.28 metres. Height is 20 metres in some accounts and 25 in the city's, and nobody has reconciled the two. It was designated a National Natural Monument on 30 November 1928, one of the earliest listings in the country, on size alone. Its age is given as over a thousand years, and neither official source narrows that, so neither will we. In October 2019 Typhoon Hagibis snapped a major limb off the north side. The city dressed and disinfected the wound and braced what was left on cables, finishing the work in February 2020, by which point the tree was already throwing new shoots from the base. A shrine stood here once. It has gone; the tree outlasted it. The lane in is narrow and residential, so come quietly.