What is the oldest tree in Odawara?
Odawara's only mapped tree, and its oldest, is the Choukouzan Weeping Cherry (Prunus itosakura, weeping form), an Odawara City Natural Monument roughly 350 years old, standing on the former grounds of Shotaiji temple in Iryuda.
Shotaiji, the family temple of the Inaba clan, burned in the 1850s and again in 1915; what remains on the site today is 360 stone steps, eight Inaba-clan graves, and this weeping cherry, now the reason people climb the hill. Odawara designated it a city Natural Monument in 1957, and Kanagawa Prefecture named it one 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. No documented planting date exists, but Japanese Wikipedia notes a presumption it went in around 1669 when the temple relocated here, putting it at roughly 350 years old; other sources round to 300 years or more. Concerns over its vigour in the 1980s and 90s led Sumitomo Forestry to begin cloning it in 2003, succeeding by 2009; the clones now grow both at the temple and at a nearby children's park. None of that has slowed the spring crowds: late March into early April, visitors queue from Iriuda Station, a twenty minute climb below, to see it in bloom. Free, on a signposted public walking course, no gate or fee.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.