Japanese White Pine

The one beside the pond at Kinkaku-ji was a bonsai in a pot belonging to Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the shogun who built the Golden Pavilion; after his death in 1408 it was planted out and clipped, generation after generation, into a sailing ship with its bow pointed west toward the Pure Land. Yoshimine-dera's grows almost flat instead of upward, named the playing dragon in 1857 and once fifty metres end to end, until bark beetles in 1994 cost it fifteen. Hosen-in's is the subject of a picture frame garden: you sit on a red felt cushion in a wooden hall and look at it through a doorway. In Seattle's Kubota Garden, one was the favourite tree of the gardener who spent his life making the place.