Myokoku-ji no Sotetsu (the Homesick Cycad)

Oda Nobunaga took this plant, and by the story it cried until he gave it back. The warlord had the cycad moved to his castle at Azuchi around 1580. It wailed for Sakai every night, and when he ordered it cut down it bled and thrashed like a snake, which frightened him into sending it home to Myokoku-ji. A shrine, Ugatoku-ryujin, marks the spot where it grows, and the Edo-period gazetteer Izumi Meisho-zue wrote the whole affair down. The plant is old enough to have had time to collect stories. Over 1,100 years, by tradition, a figure the temple, the Sakai tourism board and both Wikipedias repeat with no dating method behind it. It counts as one of Japan's Three Great Cycads and was the first cycad in the country made a Natural Monument, in December 1923 or December 1924 depending on which source you take. What stands there is not a tree so much as a colony: roughly 120 trunks and limbs of every size rising from one base, sprawling rather than towering, seven or eight metres at the tallest, which is why no single girth figure means much. A 2008 survey of the healthiest clump put its base at 387 centimetres round. It has needed help. Yellowing leaves recorded by 1999 brought a restoration committee that worked the grove from 2008 to 2011, and the temple still runs viewing days each spring. Entry is 400 yen. Locals call the place the Cycad Temple, after this one plant.