This weeping cherry began its life somewhere inside the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds before Emperor Komei, who reigned from 1846 to 1867 and was the father of the Meiji Emperor, had it given to Ka...
Weeping Higan Cherry
Prunus subhirtella
Shidarezakura hang their flowering branches straight down, so the tree makes a curtain you walk under rather than a canopy you look up into, and they open before the ordinary somei-yoshino. We map 8 of them, in 6 cities.
The greatest is the Miharu Takizakura in Fukushima, the waterfall cherry, put at over a thousand years by tradition, its crown 22 metres across; around 300,000 people a year come to stand under it. In the hills of Yamanashi, Shinden no Oitozakura told Kobuchisawa's farmers when to plant rice before calendars did. Kyoto's famous ones are often stand-ins, and nobody minds. The weeping cherry everyone photographs at Maruyama Park is the second one on the spot. The Taiko cherry at Daigo-ji is not the tree Toyotomi Hideyoshi saw at his enormous blossom party of 1598, but it stands where the party happened. In Nara, the local spring is dated from the cherry beside the approach to Himuro Shrine.
Kyoto
In the spring of 1598, months before his death, the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi staged one of the most extravagant cherry blossom parties in Japanese history at Daigo-ji, inviting hundreds of guests...
Photo: KimonBerlin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The tree everyone photographs at Maruyama Park is not the tree that made the spot famous.
Photo: Raita Futo, Wikimedia Commons (via Flickr) (CC BY 2.0)
Kamakura
Jochiji flowers before the rest of Kamakura does.
Nara
Nara's spring officially starts at this tree.
Photo: Degueulasse (CC BY 3.0)
Hokuto
Before calendars told Kobuchisawa's farmers when to plant rice, this cherry did.
Photo: Sakaori (talk) (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Miharu
The 2011 earthquake left this tree unharmed.
Yamanashi City
At 8.7 metres tall this is a small tree, and people drive a mountain road to stand in front of it anyway.
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