The Great Camphor of Wakamiya

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.