The Great Cycad of Ryuge-ji

From the temple path this looks like a thicket of small palms. It is one plant, and fifty-eight thick trunks fan out of a single base 5.2 metres around. A sago palm is not a palm. It is a cycad, from a lineage that was already ancient when the first flowering plants appeared, and it grows so slowly that all of this stands under four metres tall. Japan made it a Natural Monument on 9 December 1924, one of the first seven cycads in the country to be designated, and the botanist Honda Masaji called it the largest cultivated cycad in Japan. It is counted among the three great cycads, alongside one at Noman-ji and one in Sakai. It is a male specimen, which the 1924 register already recorded. Its age belongs to the temple rather than to science. The placard says the plant was carried from China and given to Ryuge-ji by Tokugawa Yorinobu and Tokugawa Yorifusa, and puts it at roughly 1,100 years. No dating anybody can check has ever been published, so read that figure as the tradition it is. What has been measured is the shape of it: 2.6 metres round on the north branch, 2.3 in the centre, 1.7 on the south, with the whole crown covering about nine metres in each direction. The temple charges a few hundred yen and the grounds are open roughly 8:30 to 16:30.