The Saw-leaf Zelkova of Tamukeyama Hachimangu

Twenty-eight metres of zelkova on a shrine slope that most visitors cross without stopping, on their way between the Great Buddha and Nigatsu-do. Keyaki is the tree Japanese carpentry is built out of. Temple pillars, drum shells, the great beams of a hall: when a Japanese building needed timber that would hold a load for three hundred years, this was the species it was cut from. The irony of a four-metre keyaki standing in a temple precinct is that a tree this good was usually felled long before it got here. This one was measured at four hundred and five centimetres round in the national giant-tree survey, in good health, and it is the only zelkova the survey records at this shrine. Tamukeyama Hachimangu sits on the rise immediately south of Nigatsu-do, and is the shrine that was brought to Nara in the eighth century to watch over the casting of the Great Buddha. In autumn the slope turns, and a zelkova is one of the reasons: the species goes copper rather than yellow.