What is the oldest tree in Otama?
The oldest tree in Otama is Baba Zakura, an Edo-higan cherry in the grounds of Fukumitsu Kokuzo-do temple. Otama Village puts its age at around a thousand years, a figure carried down locally rather than measured. It has been a National Natural Monument since December 1936 and a Fukushima Green Cultural Property since 1983.
The thousand-year figure is tradition, not a growth-rate reading: no core sample or ring count backs it, and the page states that plainly rather than dressing it up as a measurement. What is documented is the tree's condition. A 1936 survey measured it 21 metres tall with a trunk 7.45 metres round; the village's own figures today are 15 metres and 7 metres, the difference being what nine decades and one storm took. On 1 March 2018 a gale pushed the tree over at its base. Villagers cut back the broken trunk, hauled the remainder upright, packed the roots and kept working on it since. It still stands and still flowers each April, sparsely, from the young branches left. The name means the cherry of the riding ground: tradition holds that Minamoto no Yoshiie, campaigning north during the Later Three Years' War, pushed a cherry-wood riding whip into the earth to tether his horses and the whip rooted, the surrounding field used to train his cavalry. Farmers read the bloom as the signal to sow rice, hence the seed-sowing cherry. Free to visit, about 15 minutes by car from Motomiya interchange.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.