Fujitaro Kubota planted somewhere between fifteen and twenty of these pines along the drive of his garden.
Japanese Red Pine
Pinus densiflora
Pinus densiflora is the red pine of Japan, called akamatsu for the orange-red plates its bark breaks into higher up the trunk, brighter the further you look. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
Matsutake, the country's most expensive mushroom, forms almost exclusively on its roots, which is one reason old red pine groves like the one at Hongu Hachiman Shrine in Higashi-Hiroshima have been tended for centuries. In the mountains above Shokawa, a single red pine forks two metres up into three trunks reaching the same height, a shape the surveyor who recorded it compared to Neptune's trident; the marker beside it, dated 1971, still calls it Mumaya Sanbonmatsu, the name three pines for a tree that is only one. In Seattle's Kubota Garden, a Japanese immigrant gardener planted an avenue of about twenty in the 1920s; a century of storms has left exactly one standing.
Seattle
Higashi-Hiroshima
Matsutake grow under trees like this one.
Shokawa
The name means three pines.
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