The Katsura of Maruyama

There is uncut forest 3.7 kilometres from Sapporo station. Maruyama is a 225 metre cone standing on its own at the western edge of the grid, and while everyone knows the park and the zoo at its foot, the hill itself is covered in natural woodland that Japan designated a National Natural Monument in March 1921 under the name Maruyama Primeval Forest. Katsura is the species that gets big in it, particularly on the north side, and this one is 12.2 metres round and 27 metres tall. Follow the path from the Daishido, the gate to the eighty-eight station pilgrimage circuit, up beside what looks like an irrigation channel and is the Maruyama river, and the tree is on the bank; the way the roots gather into the trunk is the thing to look at. Two honest caveats come with it. The Environment Ministry's database lists several katsura here at 12.0, 11.5, 9.5 and 8.4 metres, all of them clusters of stems rather than single trunks, and which record belongs to which tree is not resolvable from the data. The ministry also files this one under a different address and owner, which if correct would put it just outside the protected forest. It is a magnificent tree standing on a boundary in two senses.