What is the oldest tree in Shimizu?
Shimizu's mapped tree is the Great Cycad of Ryuge-ji, a single sago palm at Ryuge-ji Temple whose fifty-eight thick trunks fan out of one base 5.2 metres around, making it look like a thicket rather than one plant. It is counted among Japan's three great cycads and, per the botanist Honda Masaji, the largest cultivated cycad in the country. Its age, roughly 1,100 years, comes from temple tradition rather than any dating method.
Japan designated it a Natural Monument on 9 December 1924, one of the first seven cycads in the country to be so listed, and the 1924 register already recorded it as a male specimen. Temple tradition holds it was carried from China and given to Ryuge-ji by Tokugawa Yorinobu and Tokugawa Yorifusa, founders of the Kii and Mito Tokugawa lines, which is where the roughly 1,100-year figure comes from; no dating anybody can check has ever been published, so it is carried as tradition rather than measurement. What has been measured: 2.6 metres round on the north branch, 2.3 in the centre, 1.7 on the south, with the crown spanning about nine metres in each direction and the whole plant standing under four metres tall. The temple sits in Shimizu-ku, the former city merged into Shizuoka in 2003, reached by bus from Shimizu Station or by car from the Tomei Expressway.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.