Photo: Kimon Berlin and Gribeco (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The biggest black pine in Tokyo grows in a garden that floods on purpose.
Japanese Black Pine
Pinus thunbergii is the pine of the Japanese coast, tough enough for salt spray and heavy snow, and gardeners have spent centuries training it into shapes weather alone never would. This page maps every japanese black pine on the site, 6 so far across 5 cities.
Kanazawa strings ropes from a pole above its Karasaki pine every November so wet snow cannot break the limbs, the yukitsuri rigging that has become the picture of the city in winter; nearby, a Maeda lord is said to have raised another pine on a mound of earth and stripped the soil away, leaving forty-odd roots standing clear of the ground. Tokyo's grows in a garden the bay still floods daily on purpose, planted around 1709 and spent three centuries spreading rather than climbing. Nara's is simply the fattest survivor of a planting habit with no purpose but looking right: three and a half metres round, roughly two hundred and fifty years old. Five mapped so far, across four cities.
Tokyo
Nagoya
It is named after a raft of reeds that floated down four rivers and washed up beside it.
Kanazawa
Forty-odd roots stand two metres clear of the ground before they meet the trunk.
On the first of November every year, this is the tree they do first.
Nara
Black pines were planted through Nara Park for centuries for no reason except that they looked right, and this is the fattest survivor of that long habit: three and a half metres around, twenty-eig...
Kagoshima
Kagoshima protects 38 trees by name and not one of them is a pine.
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