It is one tree. Takizakura stands by itself in a hollow of farmland outside Miharu, a weeping cherry of the Edo-higan line, and the estimate of its age is over a thousand years. It is thirteen and a half metres tall, and the trunk measures eleven point three metres around the base.

The branches are the reason to come. They reach five and a half metres north of the trunk, eleven metres east, fourteen and a half south, and fourteen west. That is nearly three times as far in one direction as in the other. It is not something a photograph will tell you, because photographs get taken from the side that looks best, and the side that looks best is the south.

The tree was made a national natural monument in October 1922. During the flowering there is a charge to see it, five hundred yen, with children free through junior high school. The season runs through the first half of April and into the middle of the month, and the town keeps a daily record of how far along it is.

Stand on the south side and the branches go out over your head and keep going, past the point where you can follow them, so that the tree stops behaving like an object and starts behaving like weather. Walk round to the north and you are clear of it in a few paces. Nothing has changed except where you are standing. It is worth doing the circuit slowly for that reason alone.