The Choukouzan Weeping Cherry

Only the cherry tree remembers the temple that used to stand here. Shotaiji, the Inaba clan's family temple, burned in the 1850s and again in 1915, and today its site is 360 stone steps, eight Inaba graves, and this weeping cherry, now the whole reason anyone climbs the hill. Odawara named it a city Natural Monument in 1957, and Kanagawa Prefecture put it on a list of its hundred most famous trees in 1984. A 2007 survey measured it at 12.7 metres tall with a trunk 4.66 metres round at chest height, widening to 8 metres at the base. Its planting date is not documented, but Japanese Wikipedia notes a presumption that it went in around 1669, when the temple relocated here, which would put it at roughly 350 years old; other sources simply call it 300 years or more. The tree struggled through the late twentieth century. Concerns over its vigour in the 1980s and 90s led Sumitomo Forestry to begin cloning it in 2003, and by 2009 the cloning had succeeded; genetic copies now grow both at the temple and in a nearby children's park, a hedge against the original ever being lost. None of that dims the spring rush. Late March into early April, the cherry draws crowds queuing from Iriuda Station, a twenty minute climb below, for a tree that has outlasted the buildings around it twice over.