Ueno Park's biggest tree predates the shrine built around it by more than two centuries.
Photo: stephen (CC BY)
Camphor Tree
Cinnamomum camphora
Crush a camphor leaf and the tree explains itself: the sharp medicinal scent is camphor, distilled for centuries from its wood, and it is one reason the species lives so long, discouraging the insects and fungi that hollow out other trees. We map 70 of them, in 31 cities.
In Japan the kusunoki is the great shrine tree, wrapped in sacred rope, its canopy sometimes wider than the buildings it shelters; several of the country's largest and oldest trees are camphors, and city districts have been rerouted around them. The species is evergreen, so a thousand-year camphor in January looks as alive as it does in June. The camphor trees mapped so far are listed oldest first, shrine giants leading.
Tokyo
The biggest tree in Bunkyo Ward is not in a park.
Photo: Degueulasse (CC BY 3.0)
This is the youngest tree on this list by roughly six centuries, and also the one most people specifically travel here to touch.
Seville
As far as one dedicated local record can tell, this camphor tree has no rivals anywhere in Seville.
Kyoto
This tree has a birth year most ancient trees can only guess at: 1160, the year the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa founded Imakumano Shrine as a branch of the Kumano sanctuaries on the Kii Peninsula,...
Photo: Cakoko23 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Kyoto Gyoen, the wooded park that surrounds the old Imperial Palace, holds more than 200 trees old and large enough to be called giants by the environment ministry that manages the grounds today.
Early cinema ran on this species.
Fukuoka
Its name means the bathing lid, and the legend explains the shape.
Photo: Asturio Cantabrio (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Twenty metres around.
Photo: Asturio Cantabrio (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The official sign under this camphor hedges, and it has been hedging since 1924.
Photo: Soramimi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Measured round the roots, each of these two camphors comes to 24 metres.
Wrap a tape measure around this camphor and you will need eleven metres of it, roughly the wingspan of a small aircraft.
Fukuoka's busiest shopping street runs past a camphor tree older than the district's name.
Despite the name, the Married Camphor is one tree, not two.
In 1019 three thousand raiders from across the sea came ashore along this coast, and the shrine that stands behind this camphor began as a prayer to send them away.
Its long limbs reach out over the roof of the shrine it stands beside, which is the first thing you notice and the reason to come.
Coimbra
Its crown is wider than the tree is tall: 34.5 metres across against 28 metres of height.
Nagoya
Atsuta is one of the great shrines of Japan and it now sits in the middle of a busy city, with a wood inside the fence and traffic outside it.
Photo: Tomio344456 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Twelve metres tall and thirty-two metres across.
From the terrace this tree stands on you look out over a steelworks.
The tradition here is that Nobunaga's men tied their boats to this tree.
Cork
Crush a leaf from this tree and it releases the smell the whole species is named for: camphor, the same compound once distilled from it for mothballs, chest rubs and embalming.
Hiroshima
Shirakami Shrine sits on a rock.
Nobody at this shrine calls this tree by its species.
Every published account of these two camphors calls them a matched pair, both around 30 metres tall.
Two accounts of this camphor disagree about its age by more than a century and a half.
Genoa
Crush a leaf from this tree and your fingers smell of a medicine cabinet.
Photo: Graziella Taibi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Barcelona
This camphor tree is nearly twice as wide as it is tall.
Osaka
Once a month, on the shrine calendar's first day of the earthly-branch cycle, pilgrims climb the steps to Nankunsha and buy a small ceramic cat.
Lightning found this camphor sometime during the Taisho era, between 1912 and 1926, and burned out most of its main trunk.
At ground level this camphor splits cleanly into two trunks rising from one root, and that accident of growth turned it into a wedding-day landmark.
In 1811 a theatre manager named Uemura Bunrakuken opened a puppet theatre in Namba Shrine's courtyard, and the venue's nickname eventually gave its name to an entire art form: Bunraku, Japan's clas...
Photo: Yanajin33 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Hong Kong
Ten adults linking arms cannot fully encircle this camphor's trunk, and the tree they would be hugging predates every building in the village it half-hides.
Japanese soldiers cut down most of Lantau Island's large trees for fuel during the wartime occupation, and by local account, they stopped short of this one because they believed a guardian spirit h...
Only one of this camphor's original five trunks is missing, and the reason it lost that one and not the rest is the whole story: during the Japanese occupation, soldiers came to cut the tree for fu...
The three camphors already on this page stand behind villages, kept for centuries as feng shui trees.
This camphor is held up by hardware.
Naples
This camphor tree arrived from China at the start of the 1800s, part of the Bourbon dynasty's decades-long project of turning their hunting estate at Capodimonte into a botanical showcase to rival...
A second camphor tree grows in Capodimonte's Royal Orchard, arriving in the same 19th century wave of Chinese imports as its counterpart in the Garden of the Princes but growing considerably wider:...
Bologna
The garden surrounding the Rizzoli hospital splits into two distinct characters, and this camphor grows in the gentler of the two: a western section mixing old oaks, holm oaks, cypresses, lindens a...
Porto
The road came second.
Taipei
Six Japanese schoolteachers are buried under this camphor.
Caserta
Thirty-eight metres is a strange height for a camphor tree.
Kagoshima
This is the largest tree in Japan, and it was already being worshipped when the shrine beside it was founded in 1123.
Kagoshima's preserved-tree register opens with this camphor.
There is old forest 300 metres from Kagoshima's city hall because a lord gave up on a castle.
Of the 38 trees Kagoshima protects, only two are taller than this one.
Saigo Takamori once lived on this exact patch of ground.
Its main limb leaves the trunk at a slant and keeps going, out across the road, until it hangs over the cars parked on the other side.
Miyazaki
People sheltered inside this tree during the war.
By the chronicles, three of the most important gods in Japan were born a few hundred metres from this tree.
Japan designated sixteen trees here at once.
In 1870 the government ordered this tree cut down and the parishioners bought it back with rice.
The address says Shimanouchi and everything else here says Sumiyoshi.
Nara
Twelve point eight metres around at the ground, and it holds a rope.
Photo: Kochizufan (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Five hundred and seventy-eight centimetres round and thirty metres tall, which makes this the largest tree on the Kasuga side of Nara Park that is not inside the paid precinct.
Three trees planted in 1908 have grown into one cloud.
Photo: Soramimi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Atami
Circle this camphor once, local tradition says, and you gain a year of life.
Higashimiyoshi
Its own town says this is the most beautiful tree in Japan, and makes the case on shape rather than size.
Photo: ball banban (CC BY 3.0)
Kawago
A monk once carved a two-and-a-half-metre Buddha into this camphor's hollow trunk.
Photo: STA3816 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Kawatana
It is called the Camphor Forest of Kawatana and it is a single tree.
Kawazu
Six of the seven are gone.
Kimotsuki
This camphor grows out of the top of a grave.
Kozaki
In 1674 the daimyo Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the man folklore knows as Mito Komon, stopped in front of this camphor and asked, in effect, what on earth is this tree.
Photo: katorisi (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Madeira
Crush a leaf and you will know whether you have found the right tree.
Omishima
There is a footpath through this tree.
Photo: そらみみ (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Japan's first Prime Minister planted this one himself, which makes it the youngest tree of any consequence in a precinct where the others are counted in millennia.
A third camphor stands in the same shrine grounds, and it is the one visitors meet first.
Photo: そらみみ (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Takeo
There is a small stone shrine inside this tree.
Photo: そらみみ (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Ueki
A Sengoku-period lord is said to be buried at the base of this camphor tree, his grave wrapped into roots that have grown over it for centuries.
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