The Enoki of Wakamiya

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.