The Great Ginkgo of Bodaiji

As a boy, the story goes, Honen used a ginkgo branch as a walking stick on his climb up Mount Nagi to study at Bodaiji temple. Reaching the gate, he planted the stick in the ground and told it to take root once his learning was complete. He grew up to found Jodo, Pure Land Buddhism, one of Japan's largest schools, and the branch grew into this tree. It is not just a good story. In 2013, Nagi's own education board ran DNA tests linking this ginkgo to two others nearby: one at the foot of the mountain, where tradition says Honen first cut the branch, and a third grown from a piece of this tree's own crown, broken off by snow about two centuries ago. The genetics do not date the tree, but they corroborate the chain the legend describes. At 42.5 metres tall with an 11-metre trunk, it is the largest ginkgo in Okayama Prefecture and one of only twenty ginkgos nationwide to hold National Natural Monument status, since 1928. It is male and produces no fruit, so none of the smell that marks autumn ginkgo season elsewhere. A 1955 fire, started by someone trying to smoke a marten out of its hollow trunk, and a 1989 typhoon both left marks it has since grown past. The temple that grew up around it still lights it for visitors after dark.