Buddhist Pine

Podocarpus macrophyllus is a broad-leaved conifer from Japan and southern China, and the trees mapped here show how differently the same species ends up living. At Kakuonji in Kamakura, past where the tourist route gives up, one grows as a City Natural Monument in the quiet inner precinct of a temple most visitors never reach. In Naples, Piazza Cavour holds a pair: the register only recognises the upright one, 25 metres tall, because its twin toppled years ago and kept growing horizontally, struck from the official list for lying down rather than for dying. In Las Vegas it turns up as ordinary landscaping, pressed flat against a wall on the UNLV campus, and happens to be the state's largest recorded specimen anyway. A temple guardian, a survivor lying on its side, and a state record hiding as a hedge plant.