The Bald Cypress of Miyazaki Shrine

This is the largest bald cypress in Japan, and it is a stranger here. Taxodium distichum grows wild in the swamps of the American southeast and did not exist in this country until somebody carried it in, so every one in Japan was planted by a person, and the Environment Ministry's giant-tree database holds 27 of them under two different Japanese names. This one is number 1. It stands 24 metres tall with a trunk 5 metres round, near the entrance to the main approach at Miyazaki Shrine, on the left as you go in. It is a conifer that drops its needles, which is unusual enough in Japan to confuse people, and in its native swamps it grows knees, woody knobs that come up out of the ground around the trunk. The age is soft and the page will not pretend otherwise: a signboard from the prefecture's hundred-giant-trees project put it at 100 when it went up in 1992, which carried forward makes it about 130 now. The shrine it stands in is dedicated to Emperor Jimmu, who by the chronicles set out from this province to found the state, and it is a large quiet wood in the middle of a city.