Shiroko Fudan Zakura

Fudanzakura means roughly ceaseless cherry: this tree scatters a few blossoms across its branches almost year round, pausing mainly in high summer, with documented peaks each March and again in autumn into winter. A 1978 Mie University study found why: unusually early leaf drop each September seems to trigger a second, off-season round of flower buds. It is also the tree an entire named cultivar copies from, the type specimen of Fudanzakura, one of only 39 cherry trees Japan has ever designated a national natural monument, since 1923. Written references to a named cherry here reach back to a temple record from 757 to 765 CE, and it turns up again in 16th-century renga poetry, as the subject of an Edo-period Noh play, and illustrated in a 1797 guidebook to the Ise shrines. The wood standing today is not that old. This trunk has died back and resprouted repeatedly: in 1897, after storm damage in 1925, a temple fire in 1946, and a typhoon in 1959. The current growth is put at roughly 80 years, dating from that fire. What has survived, unbroken for well over a thousand years, is the spot, the name, and the habit of flowering when nothing else nearby is. Free, in the walled courtyard of Koyasu Kannon-ji Temple, two minutes on foot from Tsuzumigaura Station. The temple still holds a memorial for it every 17 March.