Sugisawa no O Sugi (Sugisawa's Great Cedar)

In 1643 the lord of the Nihonmatsu domain, Niwa Mitsushige, stopped under this cedar on an inspection tour and, by local account, was struck enough by it to rename the village Sugisawa after the tree. The name has stuck for close to four hundred years. It has been a National Natural Monument since August 1943 and a Fukushima Green Cultural Property since 1983, and of the great cedars of this prefecture it is the one in the best condition: vitality described as vigorous, and remarkably little decay in the trunk for a tree of its age. That has not happened on its own. The cavity was treated, the roots reinforced and supports fitted in 1986 and 1987; between 2006 and 2008 the soil over the root plate was improved and visitors were kept off it. Its size is genuinely hard to pin down, because the trunk divides into five main stems from about 6.6 metres up and the crown spreads 25 to 30 metres across. Nihonmatsu City records a girth of 12.8 metres; the standard breast-height measurement is 10.9 metres, and the root girth 22.5 metres. Height is given as 50 metres, with one source stretching that to 68, which is tall enough for a sugi to be worth treating carefully. The age usually quoted is around a thousand years, and one source allows for considerably less. Nobody has counted the rings.