The Shokawa-zakura

Two cherry trees stand together on a bluff above Miboro Lake, and neither one grew here. Both were transplanted whole in 1960, roots and all, from temple grounds a few kilometres away that were about to disappear under a new dam's reservoir. The man who pushed for it was Jpower's first president, and the gardener he needed, Shintaro Sasabe, turned him down at first. He changed his mind, found a second tree to save alongside the first, and set out to move two mature Edohigan cherries, each with a trunk about six metres round, without killing them. Contemporary accounts describe the scale of the operation as unprecedented anywhere in the world, and the sight of two centuries-old trees being hauled to new ground drew real criticism for how brutal it looked in progress. Both took root in the spring of 1961. In June the following year they were given a joint name, Shokawa-zakura, and the valley they came from is now underwater. They still bloom together every year in late April, lit in the evenings through the flowering weeks, and around fifty thousand people make the trip to see them. At roughly 450 to 500 years old, they were already grown trees when they were young by dam standards. Moving them did not stop them from being old.