This tree changes colour as it dies back. The name Usuzumi means pale ink, and Gifu prefecture's account explains it: the buds are a light pink, the flowers open white, and as the petals fall they turn a faint grey, the colour of thin ink on paper. Three colours in one flowering, and only the middle one is the colour people picture when they hear the word cherry blossom.

The tree is reckoned to be more than fifteen hundred years old and is designated a National Natural Monument, which puts its care in the hands of the state.

It stands 17.3 metres high and measures 9.4 metres around the trunk, which is large, but the numbers are not really the point of it.

What matters is that it is one tree, alone in a valley in the mountains north of Motosu, with no avenue and no grove around it. And that the name it goes by is not taken from the white of full bloom, which is what most people photograph, but from the grey of the last few days, which most people never see. To understand why it is called what it is called, you have to come back at the end. The timing given here is not the prefecture's; it comes from the weather record for Gifu city, and the valley runs later.