The crown of this tree is ten metres wider than the tree is tall.
Chinese Hackberry
Celtis sinensis
In Japan this tree is enoki, and for two and a half centuries it did a job before it did anything ornamental: the Tokugawa shogunate planted one, or a red pine, at every ichirizuka, the paired earthen mounds that marked each ri of the great highways out of Edo, so a traveller had shade to rest in as well as a distance to measure. We map 5 of them, in 3 cities.
Shrines took to it for the same reasons: it grows fast, broad and long-lived. The Enoki of Wakamiya in Nara, below Kasuga Taisha, is five metres round and only seventeen tall, put at two to three centuries by the national survey. Kyoto's at the Demizu-guchi gate of the Imperial Palace has a crown ten metres wider than the tree is tall, and a Hiroshima shrine's stands taller than the celebrated wife camphor beside it and has never been given a name.
Kyoto
One document describes this tree, and it is a list of measurements.
Hiroshima
The national register that catalogues this tree keeps a field for a local nickname.
As far as we can establish, one document in the world records this tree.
Nara
Five metres round and only seventeen metres tall, which is the shape a hackberry takes when it has had room and time: squat, heavy in the trunk, and spread out sideways rather than up.
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