Four national highways die at the crossroads this tree stands over.
Photo: あじさか (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Kurogane Holly
Ilex rotunda
Kurogane holly is a glossy-leaved evergreen of warm southern Japan that rarely gets large: Japan's giant-tree register will not count a trunk under three metres. We map 3 of them, in 2 cities.
Two of the three the site maps clear that easily. Kagoshima's Terukuni Park holly is thickest at 4.85 metres, multi-stemmed, standing at the crossroads where four national highways end; the city made it preserved tree number 6 in 1974, its first batch of designations. A second Kagoshima tree, in Gionnosu Park on land reclaimed from the Inari river mouth, has reached 2.4 metres since roughly the 1890s and now shares its ground with three nineteenth-century stone bridges moved there after a 1993 flood destroyed their originals. Higashi-Hiroshima's, on the temple mountain of Fukujo-ji, measures 3.1 metres and is the only one of the three with no recorded age.
Kagoshima
This holly is 15 metres tall on a trunk 2.4 metres round, which for the species is close to the limit, and it stands on ground that was under water when it started.
Higashi-Hiroshima
Japan's national giant-tree register takes nothing under three metres of girth, which is why it is full of cedars and thin on hollies.
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