The Great Nagi of Kasuga Taisha

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.