The Red Oak of the Botanic Garden

This tree was posted from Massachusetts. The Hokkaido University Botanic Garden, set up on William Clark's recommendation, took delivery of a northern red oak from Harvard's Arnold Arboretum in the middle Meiji period, roughly 130 years ago, and it is now 32 metres tall on a trunk 4.5 metres round and is very probably the largest of its species in Japan. Red oak is North American, so every one in this country arrived the same way, in somebody's luggage or a crate. What makes the garden worth the entry fee is not really the individual trees. It sits 700 metres from Sapporo station in the middle of a city laid out on a grid, and going through the gate is an abrupt change: outside is a wide ordinary street and inside is bright, closed woodland on the original ground, so completely unlike its surroundings that the source describes it as feeling like a jump through space. The oak goes deep red in autumn, which is what the garden's own board points out about it, and it is used here as the garden's representative tree. There is no visitor car park, and the garden shuts out of season.