Now and then I can’t resist quoting my correspondent in Japan. We have a mutual interest in special trees, and the weeping Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum ‘Pendulum’) comes high on the list.
‘I have something very big and beautiful to show you,’ she writes. ‘I went to see the great weeping Katsura of Ryugenji’s Temple, in Iwate prefecture …a rusted sign erected in 1992 says it is 22 metres high … There was a breeze but unlike the slouched whip-like sweeps of a weeping willow it stood straight and just swayed slightly, like the ladies of Downton Abbey (although these trees are always male). The original tree, a Katsura mutant, is thought to have been found in the mountains and planted around 1574 when the temple was built.
There is evidence that it was felled in 1824, at 30 metres, to use a timber to renovate the temple. The present tree in from a basal shoot, thus about 193 years old.’ ‘All weeping Katsura might be related to this tree, standing behind a Zen Buddhist temple guarding a graveyard, with mostly rice paddies round it.’
But she ends on a note much nearer to home: the dreaded cydalima. ‘How to get rid of box caterpillars? Everyone seems to be crying for help here too’.
