The Japanese White Pine of Kubota Garden

Of every tree in the garden he spent his life making, this was Fujitaro Kubota's favourite. The city's own tree walk says so, and it is the kind of detail that changes how you look at a tree. It is a Japanese white pine, and what caught his eye is still there to see: a white line running along each needle, which, in the guide's words, exudes brightness and light. It has been pruned carefully for more than eighty years, and what the guide praises is not its size but its limbs and lines, which is what that much patient cutting produces. That pruning is its real age record. Nobody has published a planting date, only that the shaping has gone on for over eight decades, and it cannot be older than the garden itself, which Kubota, a Japanese immigrant gardener, founded here in 1927. So somewhere between eighty and a hundred years is the honest range. If you know when it went in, tell us. The garden around it became a city landmark in 1981 and a free public park in 1987, and the pine has been tended through all of it. It stands in the Japanese Garden section, stop fourteen on the city's Kubota Garden tree walk. The pin marks the garden rather than the tree.