The Kubo-zakura of Isazawa

Someone sheltering in the hollow at its base lit a cooking fire, and the Kubo-zakura lost two of its main limbs to it. That was the nineteenth century. The burn reshaped the crown into what now reads as two trees fused at the foot, and the tree has leaned on props ever since. More than sixty of them hold it up today. It is one of the largest Edo-higan cherries in Tohoku: 13.85 metres tall, 8.1 metres round the trunk, 10.8 at the root collar, and a national Natural Monument since December 1924. An older nickname, Yontan-zakura, remembers a canopy said to have spread across roughly forty ares. The legends are worth telling as legends. A 1925 prefectural survey recorded that the shogun Sakanoue no Tamuramaro planted it on the grave of Otama of the Kubo clan, who died of grief when his campaign moved on; other local versions credit a grieving lord. Both are stories, and so is the traditional age of 1,200 years. What is on record is that the lord of Yonezawa came to watch it bloom in the 1830s and 40s, and that the ten-are plot beneath it paid no tax until the Meiji Restoration. Burnt heartwood cannot grow the fresh roots an old cherry uses to renew itself, so since 2006 conservators have packed peat moss and charcoal around the wound. By 2010 new roots up to three centimetres thick had reached the ground.