Yashiro-no-Okeyaki

When it was listed in 1928 this was called the finest zelkova in Hyogo Prefecture. It has lost about a third of its height since. Yashiro-no-Okeyaki grows at the foot of Mount Babayama on the grounds of Ashika Shrine. The national register measured it at designation on 24 March 1928: roughly 17.6 metres round at the roots, 12.7 where the roots become trunk, 8.1 metres at a metre and a half up, and close to 30 metres tall. Only the last of those figures moved. Typhoon damage and building work on the shrine ground hollowed the trunk out, and the tree now reaches about 20 metres. The 8.1 metre girth was taken again by a Tajima heritage survey and came back the same. Its age is put at a thousand years and some hundreds more, which is as far as anyone will commit. There is no planting record behind it, so the range stays wide here rather than being tidied into a number. It did not get through the last century unaided. Asago carried out major restoration work in 1988 with national and prefectural money and has kept up trunk preservation since, which is why a hollow tree of this age still holds a full crown. Free, on open shrine ground in Yashiro, about nine kilometres from the spiral-grained kaya at Takinoya.