What is the oldest tree in Nara?
The oldest tree in Nara is the giant camphor behind the main hall of Naratsuhiko Shrine on the old Narazaka pass road, recorded as over a thousand years old and protected as a Nara Prefecture Natural Monument since 1951. It measures 12.8 metres around at ground level and roughly thirty metres tall, forking into two great limbs about seven metres up. It is free to visit.
The age is traditional rather than measured, as it is for almost every great camphor in Japan, but the size supports it and the shrine's own founding legend puts it at twelve centuries. What makes this tree worth the fifteen minute bus ride is what happens beneath it. On the evening of the eighth of October each year 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 in the camphor's shade. The tree stands on Narazaka, the pass that carried travellers into the capital from the north, so anyone arriving in Nara from Kyoto in the eighth century walked past it. The only serious rival for the title is the great cedar at Kasuga Taisha, which sources date at somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand years and which has the better documentary evidence.
One of Nara's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip, a themed collection spanning several cities.