The Yōgō Pine of Zenyoji

For eleven years, from the 1970s to 1980, nobody in Japan could agree which pine had the bigger crown. This one, at Zenyoji Temple in Edogawa Ward, stands only about eight metres tall, but its branches spread over 800 square metres, the widest known canopy of any pine in the country. Its rival grew four hundred kilometres away in Shido, Kagawa, and the argument over whose spread was wider made national news until a sumo chief referee was brought in to settle it. In 1980 he ruled both trees joint champions, yokozuna, and a plaque naming them co-champions still stands under this one. The rival tree in Kagawa died in 1993. This tree nearly went the same way. A pond beside it was filled in, the roots suffocated, and by 2001 the pine was visibly dying. The city and the temple spent a decade rebuilding the soil and drainage around it before declaring the recovery finished in July 2011. Two months later the national government upgraded its status from a Tokyo-metropolitan monument, held since 1926, to a National Natural Monument. It is thought to be over six hundred years old, older than the temple grounds it stands in, and its vast low canopy is held up today by eighty-two props, visible proof of how much weight the branches have never had to carry themselves. Nobody has narrowed the age past "600 years or more": no source offers a tighter figure, so none is invented here.