More Street Trees Of Tokyo - Shinagawa In July

With multiple visits to Tokyo now under my belt, I have come to realize that there are plenty of things that I am drawn to during my stays including the hospitality, the crazy products, work (of course) and maybe most significantly:  their horticulture.  Mostly their trees.

I've posted a bunch about the trees of Tokyo starting with my first visit where I saw the Cherry trees in full blossom in 2017.  Earlier this year, I posted some photos from a Spring visit where I saw some workers pruning street trees into a columnar shape and had the good fortune of seeing the deciduous trees without their leaves.  I also posted this photo of a carefully crafted pine tree outside of the Peninsula Hotel close to the office I was visiting.   The pruning they do starts young as I found a few very thin pine trees close to a building that have begun their pruning/training.   And...where I saw the most interesting collection of trees (mostly White and Black Pines) was in the outer gardens of the Imperial Palace.  I posted an overhead shot of the outer gardens and then walked over there to get a closer look.

I'm not the only one who is drawn to the trees of Tokyo - just a quick Google Search will turn up a bunch of sites that catalog and chronicle the trees around the City.

On this recent visit, I stayed in Shinagawa and was able to spend a little bit of daylight time outside where I came across a few interesting trees.  First, check out the photo at the top of this post - it has two cool trees.  The one on the left is contorted and has a real architectural-nature to it, while the one on the right is quite columnar and from this distance appears to be a Ginko tree.  Compare the structure of that columnar tree in the photo above with the 'naked' ones in this post from the early Spring.   I'm not certain that the trees I saw in Ginza in the Spring were Ginkos, but they just might be....after all....according to the "Street Trees of Tokyo" site, there are 64,237 Ginko trees in the City.  Yeah!  64K Ginkos! (We had a Ginko at our old house in Elmhurst.  Loved it.  Nat's parents gave it to me to mark my Kellogg graduation.)

Here, below, is a closer look at the columnar trees along the road outside the Tokyo Marriott.  It has been pruned into this columnar shape with a point at the very top.  Also...check out those Sky Pencil Holly planted in between the trees. 

Alright...now back to the tree on the left.  Here, below, is a closer look at just that tree.  Pretty incredible, right?  I'm not sure what species it is, but based experience (we have a flowering Cherry at home!) and on raw numbers, there's a good chance it is Flowering Dogwood.

Here's a look down the street that shows the trees and the holly lined up along the street.  They're all planted right on the curb and have very small planter/root boxes that aren't hard-scaped over - which is very different than what we normally see in Chicago.  We have those iron grates that kind of straddle the rootboxes and make the area traverse-able on foot.