What is the oldest tree in Uda?
The oldest tree in Uda is the Sen'nen-zakura of Butsuryuji, a Mochizuki cherry over 900 years old, which Nara Prefecture calls the largest and oldest cherry in the prefecture. Matabei-zakura, in the Ouda district, is younger at roughly 300 years. The Yatsufusa Sugi, a fused cedar cluster, carries no established age at all.
The Sen'nen-zakura's age is the prefecture's own repeated claim, over 900 years, taken from official sources rather than measured independently, and this page keeps that figure unsharpened rather than rounding it to the popular nickname's 'thousand years'. It stands beside the stone steps of Butsuryuji temple in the Haibara district, trunk 7.7 metres round, breaking into eleven limbs about two metres up. Matabei-zakura, in the Ouda district about 6 kilometres away, is a weeping cherry on the site of the Goto family's former samurai residence, put at around 300 years by two sources that both hedge the figure as tradition rather than measurement; it is lit after dark during peak bloom and appeared in the opening titles of NHK's 2000 taiga drama Aoi. The Yatsufusa Sugi, in the Utano district, is a cluster of fused cedar trunks whose count is disputed between six and eight depending on the source and the measuring method, with no age established at all beyond a legend about Emperor Jinmu; this page states that plainly rather than repeating the legend as fact. All three sit in different districts of the same municipality, Ouda, Haibara and Utano, so treat each as its own short outing.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.