For eleven years, from the 1970s to 1980, nobody in Japan could agree which pine had the bigger crown.
Japanese Black Pine
Pinus thunbergii
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. We map 13 of them, in 9 cities.
The Yogo Pine at Zenyoji in Tokyo, said to be over six hundred years old, is eight metres tall and spreads over more than eight hundred square metres on eighty-two wooden props; in 1980 a sumo referee was called in to settle whether it or a rival in Kagawa was Japan's finest pine, and ruled them joint champions. Kanazawa strings ropes from a pole above its Karasaki pine every November so wet snow cannot break the limbs, the rigging that has become the picture of the city in winter. Tokyo's Hamarikyu pine grows in a garden the bay still floods on purpose, and Nara's is the fattest survivor of centuries of planting for looks.
Tokyo
The biggest black pine in Tokyo grows in a garden that floods on purpose.
Photo: Kimon Berlin and Gribeco (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Tokyo once designated a set of black pines as its own Natural Monuments.
Photo: Sakaori (talk) (CC BY 3.0)
Eight metres tall, and it takes eighty-two wooden props to hold it up.
Kanazawa
Forty-odd roots stand two metres clear of the ground before they meet the trunk.
Photo: SOHAFun (CC BY-SA 4.0)
On the first of November every year, this is the tree they do first.
Photo: lienyuan lee (CC BY 3.0)
Hiroshima
Nine metres tall and twenty-six metres wide, this pine is close to three times broader than it is high, and twenty-four wooden posts hold it that way.
Boston
Ernest Henry Wilson was already home from his last expedition to Japan when he stopped at a nursery in Yokohama and bought a handful of pine seed almost as an afterthought.
Nagoya
It is named after a raft of reeds that floated down four rivers and washed up beside it.
Kagoshima
Kagoshima protects 38 trees by name and not one of them is a pine.
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...
Busan
Local tradition holds that the sailors of the Joseon naval garrison prayed to this pine for a safe return.
Higashi-Hiroshima
A black pine shaped by centuries of tending rather than left to grow wild: that is what a 3.3-metre trunk on a cultivated species like Pinus thunbergii usually means, and it is the main fact this t...
Explore by city: Tokyo · Kanazawa · Hiroshima · Boston · Nagoya · Kagoshima · Nara · Higashi-Hiroshima · every city · or browse all species.