Japan's first capital kept its trees the way it kept its temples, as part of the religion. Nara Park is not a park in the European sense but the shared grounds of Kasuga Taisha and Todai-ji, where deer have grazed for centuries and cutting a tree needed a reason. The result is a city whose oldest living things stand in the open with rope tied around them: a camphor that has watched a thousand years of festivals, a cedar drawn as a sapling in 1309, and a hollow trunk with a bamboo growing out of the top.
0 of 15 visited in Nara
Photo: Kochizufan (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1
The Giant Camphor of Naratsuhiko Shrine
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · over 1,000 years · Narazaka
Twelve point eight metres around at the ground, and it holds a rope. This camphor stands behind the main hall of a shrine on Narazaka, the pass road that carried travellers into Japan's first permanent capital from the north, which means anyone walking into Nara from Kyoto in the eighth century passed beneath it. It rises about thirty metres and forks into two great limbs some seven metres up, each of which forks again, so from below the crown reads less like a tree than like several trees agreeing to share a base. The prefecture designated it a natural monument in 1951. What makes it worth the bus ride rather than merely worth reading about is the eighth of October. On that evening the shrine performs the Okina-mai, a masked dance recognised as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property and one of the oldest surviving ancestors of Noh theatre, and it is danced here, under this tree, as it has been for centuries. Be honest about the thousand years: like almost every great camphor in Japan, the figure is traditional rather than measured. The girth supports it.
Read more and get directions →
Photo: Pufacz (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Great Cedar of Kasuga Taisha
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · between 800 and 1,000 years · Kasugano
There is a picture scroll, donated to this shrine in 1309, in which this cedar appears as a sapling. Seven centuries later it is roughly eight metres around and twenty-five tall, standing beside the hall where offerings are shared after the rituals, and the sapling in the painting is the same organism. Almost no ancient tree anywhere can be checked against its own portrait as a young plant. The better story is what grows out of its base. A second tree, a shinpaku, took root there and grew toward the neighbouring hall, and rather than cut it back somebody cut a hole in the roof and let it through. The hall still has the hole. Kasuga Taisha was founded in 768 for the deity of the Fujiwara clan and rebuilt every twenty years for centuries, so the buildings around this cedar are younger than the cedar, repeatedly. One practical note before you go: sources place the tree beside the Naoraiden near the inner gate, and it is not clear from the shrine's own pages whether that spot falls inside the free outer precinct or the paid inner one.
Read more and get directions →
3
The Five-Colour Camellia of Byakugo-ji
Common Camellia (Camellia japonica) · about 400 years · Byakugoji
One tree, five colours, and it does not drop its flowers the way a camellia is supposed to. This four hundred year old camellia opens red, white and peach blossoms on the same plant, along with striped and variegated ones, which is how it earned its name and its place among the three famous camellias of Nara. Most camellias shed the whole flower head at once, which is why the Japanese associated them with beheading and why samurai were said to dislike them; this one is a chiri-tsubaki, shedding petal by petal instead, so the ground beneath it in April is a scatter of loose colour rather than a row of fallen heads. It is only about five metres tall. The prefecture designated it a natural monument in 1957. Byakugo-ji itself sits on a hillside at the southeastern edge of the city with the whole Nara basin spread out below, which is the compensation for the climb: over a hundred stone steps stand between the bus stop and the tree, and there is no way around them.
Read more and get directions →
4
The Soapberry with a Bamboo Through It
Chinese Soapberry (Sapindus mukorossi) · not recorded · Nara Park
The trunk is hollow, and a bamboo has grown up inside it and out through the top. Bamboo from the tea house grove behind found the cavity in this soapberry, went up through it and emerged from the crown, so what stands on the bend of the Kasuga approach is one tree wearing another. The shrine's own guide describes the effect as a mother holding a child. At four and a half metres around and over fifteen tall it is claimed as the largest soapberry in Nara Prefecture, and nobody has published an age for it, which is worth saying plainly rather than inventing a number. Its black seeds had two jobs. Strung, they became prayer beads. Loose, they were the weights inside the shuttlecocks of hanetsuki, the New Year battledore game, which is why the tree turns up in old accounts of the season. The pulp around them lathers in water, and that is where the English name comes from: this is the tree people washed with before soap was cheap.
Read more and get directions →
Photo: Soramimi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
5
The Camphors of Tobihino
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · about 140 years · Nara Park
Three trees planted in 1908 have grown into one cloud. They stand in a ring fence in the middle of the Tobihino meadow, marking the spot where Emperor Meiji sat to watch army manoeuvres, and in a little over a century they have closed into a single dome so complete that most people photograph them believing they are looking at one enormous tree. The largest trunk is nearly five metres around and the crown reaches twenty-six metres. What makes the spot rather than the tree is everything else in the frame: open grass, morning mist off the hills behind, and the deer of Nara Park grazing right up to the fence, because Tobihino is where they gather. This is the youngest tree on this page by several centuries and it earns its place on presence alone. Come early. The meadow faces east, the light comes in under the crown, and the deer are out before the buses are.
Read more and get directions →
6
The Great Nagi of Kasuga Taisha
Nagi (Nageia nagi) · 500 to 1,000 years, sources disagree · Kasugano
This tree should not be here at all. Nagi grows wild in Kyushu and Taiwan, far to the south, and the nine hectares of it on this hillside are the northernmost stand of its kind, a national natural monument since 1923. Nara City's own record is blunt about why: the grove is not natural. Trees were offered to the shrine during the Nara period and the descendants of those offerings spread across the slope, so what looks like ancient woodland is the result of twelve centuries of donation. This individual is the largest of them, three and a third metres around and thirteen metres tall, which for a species this slow is why estimates run to five centuries and beyond. It is a conifer that has forgotten how to look like one: the leaves are broad, leathery ovals with parallel veins running end to end and no midrib at all, so people who know their trees stop, look again, and go and read the sign. The city protected the tree itself in 1997, along with a twenty metre square of ground around it.
Read more and get directions →
Photo: Degueulasse (CC BY 3.0)
7
The First Cherry of Nara
Weeping Higan Cherry (Prunus subhirtella) · about 100 years · Kasugano
Nara's spring officially starts at this tree. The weeping cherry standing beside the approach to Himuro Shrine opens before any other cherry in the city, which earned it the name Nara ichiban zakura, first cherry of Nara, and turns a quiet shrine into a queue for about ten days in late March. It leans over the pond in front of the gate, so the flowers arrive twice, once above you and once in the water. The shrine underneath it is stranger than the tree. It stands on the site of a Nara period ice house and enshrines the deity of ice: blocks were cut in winter, packed into a pit insulated with straw and kept through the summer for the imperial court, and ice merchants still come here to pray for their trade. Every year at the end of May the shrine holds a festival where offerings are made in ice, including whole fish frozen inside blocks. The tree is young by the standards of this page, and its hundred years rests on a single source, so treat the number lightly and the timing seriously.
Read more and get directions →
8
The Chinaberry of the East Pagoda Ruins
Chinaberry (Melia azedarach) · not recorded · Nara Park
It stands on ground that once held one of the tallest buildings in Japan. Todai-ji's east pagoda rose seven storeys and is reported at around a hundred metres, burned, was rebuilt, burned again and was never rebuilt a third time, so all that remains is a raised platform in the grass with a chinaberry beside it four and a half metres around and twenty metres tall. Nobody has published its age. What is recorded is the reason its species turns up in places like this: chinaberry was believed to drive off evil spirits and was traditionally planted in graveyards and at sites where the dead were remembered, which is exactly what a burned pagoda platform became. For most of the year it is an unremarkable spreading tree that visitors walk past on their way to the Great Buddha. For two weeks in the middle of May it covers itself in loose sprays of pale purple flowers, and the official guide to Nara Park's giant trees singles that fortnight out as the reason to come.
Read more and get directions →
9
The Thickest Black Pine of Nara Park
Japanese Black Pine (Pinus thunbergii) · about 250 years · Nara Park
Black pines were planted through Nara Park for centuries for no reason except that they looked right, and this is the fattest survivor of that long habit: three and a half metres around, twenty-eight metres tall, and roughly two hundred and fifty years old, which puts its planting in the middle of the Edo period. It is also the easiest tree on this page to reach, about five minutes from the station, standing at the corner of the block that holds Kofuku-ji's National Treasure Hall. Look at the ground under it before you look up. Flying squirrels live in the park and strip the cones for their seeds, leaving the gnawed cores scattered beneath the tree in a shape the locals compare to fried prawns, so a handful of little stripped spindles on the path is the sign that something was in the crown overnight. The official guide to the park's giant trees ends its entry on this tree by remarking that the Edo period gardeners who put it here would be pleased with how it turned out, which is a fair summary of the whole park.
Read more and get directions →
10
The Roben-sugi of Nigatsu-do
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · current tree roughly 60 years old, replanted after 1961 · Nigatsu-do, Todai-ji precinct
An eagle carried off a baby and left it in a cedar on this slope, and the baby grew up to found Todai-ji. That is the legend of the Roben-sugi. The infant was Roben, later the temple's first abbot, found and raised by a monk, and the tree on the spot has carried his name ever since. A stone monument beside it records the story.
This is not that cedar, and nobody here pretends it is. The original lived roughly six hundred years and reached 21.2 metres before the Second Muroto Typhoon came through Nara on 16 September 1961 with winds recorded at 75 metres a second. What happened afterwards is where the accounts part. One says the replacement failed to take and the tree standing today went in on 16 March 1967, raised from the one that died. Another calls this the fourth generation rather than the third. They disagree about how many attempts it took, not about whether this one has held.
So it is roughly sixty years old, which makes it the youngest tree on this page. Nara is a good place to be relaxed about that. The address is the relic here, not the timber.
It stands below the slope Nigatsu-do occupies, immediately north of the small Kojo Shrine, on the surveyed spot OpenStreetMap records for it. Free, part of Todai-ji's outer precinct, and the climb up is short.
Read more and get directions →
11
The Kaya of Nigatsu-do
Japanese Nutmeg-yew (Torreya nucifera) · 200 to 299 years, from the national survey's age band · Nigatsu-do, Todai-ji precinct
Nara's most famous tree at Nigatsu-do is a cedar of about sixty years, a replanting after the typhoon of 1961. Four metres round and two to three centuries old, this one is neither famous nor young, and almost nobody looks at it.
It is a kaya, Torreya nucifera, which is not a common thing to find at this size anywhere. The species grows so slowly that its timber is the material Japanese go and shogi boards are cut from, and a single board can take a tree's lifetime to earn. Four hundred and ten centimetres of girth on a kaya is therefore a great deal more time than the same figure on a cedar or a camphor. The national survey put it at twenty-seven metres and in good health, and recorded that it can be picked out from a distance, which on this slope means from the path below rather than from among the buildings.
Nigatsu-do is the hall whose balcony gives the view back over Nara, and where the Omizutori fire and water rites run every March. The tree stands in that company without a plaque or a legend to its name.
Read more and get directions →
12
The Saw-leaf Zelkova of Tamukeyama Hachimangu
Saw-leaf Zelkova (Zelkova serrata) · 200 to 299 years, from the national survey's age band · Tamukeyama, Todai-ji slope
Twenty-eight metres of zelkova on a shrine slope that most visitors cross without stopping, on their way between the Great Buddha and Nigatsu-do.
Keyaki is the tree Japanese carpentry is built out of. Temple pillars, drum shells, the great beams of a hall: when a Japanese building needed timber that would hold a load for three hundred years, this was the species it was cut from. The irony of a four-metre keyaki standing in a temple precinct is that a tree this good was usually felled long before it got here. This one was measured at four hundred and five centimetres round in the national giant-tree survey, in good health, and it is the only zelkova the survey records at this shrine.
Tamukeyama Hachimangu sits on the rise immediately south of Nigatsu-do, and is the shrine that was brought to Nara in the eighth century to watch over the casting of the Great Buddha. In autumn the slope turns, and a zelkova is one of the reasons: the species goes copper rather than yellow.
Read more and get directions →
13
The Great Camphor of Wakamiya
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · over 300 years, from the national survey's age band · Wakamiya, Kasuga Taisha
Five hundred and seventy-eight centimetres round and thirty metres tall, which makes this the largest tree on the Kasuga side of Nara Park that is not inside the paid precinct.
Camphor is the giant of warm Japan, and this is what the species does when nobody cuts it: a heavy, low, wide trunk carrying a crown the size of a small building, evergreen, and aromatic enough that a broken leaf smells of the stuff medicine cabinets used to smell of. The national survey put it at over three hundred years and recorded part of the crown as dying back, which is normal in a camphor of this age and not a sign of a tree in trouble.
How big it is exactly is an open question, and this page would rather say so than pick a number. The ministry measured five hundred and seventy-eight centimetres at chest height. OpenStreetMap, which also carries the tree and marks it as a natural monument, records twelve and a half metres round. Both cannot be measuring the same thing.
It stands at Wakamiya, the shrine at the end of the stone lantern avenue south of Kasuga Taisha's main hall, where the On-matsuri procession has come every December without a break since 1136.
Read more and get directions →
14
The Enoki of Wakamiya
Chinese Hackberry (Celtis sinensis) · 200 to 299 years, from the national survey's age band · Wakamiya, Kasuga Taisha
Five metres round and only seventeen metres tall, which is the shape a hackberry takes when it has had room and time: squat, heavy in the trunk, and spread out sideways rather than up.
Enoki is a tree Japan planted deliberately at the roadside, on the earth mounds that marked each ri along the old highways, because it grows fast, casts a wide shade and is easy to see from a distance. Todai-ji has one of those milestone trees at its West Gate site. This one is not that: it stands on shrine ground at Wakamiya, and nothing recorded says why it is here. What the national survey does say is that it is over five hundred centimetres in girth, two to three centuries old, and in good health, which for a species most people walk past without naming is a considerable tree.
It shares the ground with the great camphor a few steps away, so the two are one stop rather than two, at the quiet end of the stone lantern avenue below Kasuga Taisha.
Read more and get directions →
15
The Great Ginkgo of Haraedo Shrine
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · over 300 years, from the national survey's age band · Kasuga Taisha, on the approach between the Second Torii and Nanmon Gate
Before you reach Kasuga Taisha itself, the approach path stops at a small purification shrine, Haraedo, where visitors were traditionally meant to be cleansed before going on to the main sanctuary. Its ginkgo has stood over that ritual for more than three centuries.
Four metres and thirty centimetres round and twenty-five metres tall, with some dieback in the crown by the time the national survey measured it in 2000, which for a tree this size is ordinary rather than a warning. Ginkgo biloba is the oldest surviving tree lineage on Earth, essentially unchanged for two hundred million years, and it exists today mostly because people kept planting it around temples and shrines for a thousand years rather than because it thrives in the wild. This one earned its place at Haraedo the way most did, as a shrine tree rather than a survivor of anything.
Kasuga Taisha's own walking guide names it directly, the only ginkgo it names anywhere on either of its two forest routes, and says plainly what to come back for: not the ritual, but late autumn, when the tree turns and draws people who never knew Haraedo existed.
It stands on the free public approach, well before the ticketed inner precinct that holds the shrine's famous stone lanterns, so nobody needs a ticket to see it turn.
Read more and get directions →