The Enoki of Wakamiya
Approximate location. Show us where it is
How do I find it? Squat and wide rather than tall, with a heavy short trunk and small toothed leaves, standing near the great camphor. The only hackberry the national survey records at 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.
- Species
- Chinese Hackberry (Celtis sinensis)
- Girth
- 5.02 m
- Location
- Kasuga Taisha Wakamiya Shrine, Kasugano-cho, Nara (Wakamiya, Kasuga Taisha)
- Access
- Free, open shrine grounds
- Getting there
- About 30 min walk from Kintetsu Nara, or bus to Kasuga Taisha Honden and 10 min on foot
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Trees nearby
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree