The Yamaki Pine

Washington looked after this pine for 25 years before anyone here learned it had survived Hiroshima. It is a bonsai: a Japanese white pine in a pot, not a tree rooted in the ground, and it is worth the trip anyway. The Yamaki family's account, repeated by the National Bonsai Foundation, has it in training since 1625. That is a date for its life as a bonsai, not a ring count, so the tree may be older than its training. The foundation marked its 400th anniversary in 2025. In 1945 it stood in the Yamaki family nursery in Hiroshima. Officials of the Potomac Bonsai Association report that a garden wall sheltered it from the bomb. In 1976 the bonsai master Masaru Yamaki gave it to the United States, one of 53 bonsai Japan sent for the bicentennial, and by the foundation's account the oldest of them. Outside Japan, nobody knew its wartime history until 2001, when his grandsons came to visit it and told the story. The foundation now calls it the Peace Tree. It stands at the entrance to the Japanese Pavilion of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum, inside the U.S. National Arboretum. Entry is free, daily from 10 am to 4 pm. It was repotted in 2025, which at roughly four centuries old is the kind of gardening nobody rushes.