The Kameido Tenjin Wisteria

Claude Monet may owe part of his water lily garden to this shrine, according to art historians who trace a line from Hiroshige's woodblock prints to Giverny. Utagawa Hiroshige painted Kameido Tenjin's wisteria and its arched drum bridge in his 1856 series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, and that print reportedly reached and influenced French Impressionists including Monet, who filled his own garden with wisteria decades later. The shrine was founded in 1663 on marshy ground, and its first head priest planted wisteria because the vines tolerate wet soil; the fifth and eighth shoguns, Tsunayoshi and Yoshimune, are both recorded visiting specifically to see it bloom. Today around 50 wisteria plants across 15 trellises still frame the bridge every late April, trained and pruned continuously since the Edo period even if individual vines have been replaced along the way, the way a shrine's sacred rope gets rewoven without anyone calling it a different rope. Exactly how old any single living vine is remains unclear. What is certain is that people have been coming here to see wisteria bloom for more than 360 years.