Sacred & Heritage Trees

Japan has a long habit of keeping very old trees alive and treating some of them as sacred. This shelf collects articles about shinboku (sacred trees), giant trees and veteran trees, written from the point of view of an arborist in Tokyo. I am interested in two questions together: what makes a tree revered, and what it actually takes to keep it standing.
The cultural side starts with the shinboku article, which explains what the word means and why reverence, not size or age, makes a tree sacred. A second piece follows a question from a university class about whether people in Japan grow up with special feelings for such trees, and how that reverence shapes the way they are cared for. A third looks at the science of why Japan's ancient trees can live for a thousand years: roots, genetics and centuries of care.
Then there are individual trees. You will find the 2,000-year-old camphor of Kinomiya Shrine, the 1,200-year-old ginkgo of Hida Kokubunji in Takayama, the Miharu Takizakura weeping cherry, Ishiwari-zakura, which has split a granite boulder in Morioka over 360 years, and Garyu-zakura, a cherry whose trunk was split by a 1991 typhoon and which specialists were told could not recover. Another article reads the scar tissue of Hiroshima's survivor trees, which still lean toward the hypocenter.
This shelf is for travellers planning to see these trees, for people who care for old trees elsewhere, and for readers curious about the link between belief and tree care. These three are a good place to begin.
Start here

Shinboku: Japan’s Sacred Trees, Explained by an Arborist
Why Do Japan’s Ancient Trees Live for a Thousand Years?
Cherry Tree Japan Was Told Could Never Recover