Kencho-ji junipers, Kamakura

When I visited Kencho-ji temple in Kamakura, I was really impressed by magnificent juniper trees growing along the temple’s main alley. They looked like some sort of Chinese Juniper and one of them had a trunk about four meters in diameter (photo on the left). I took some photos, wandered about how old they are and forgot about them. Two months later I was reading about Kencho-ji and found that these junipers were actually planted by the founder of the temple Chinese Zen master Lan-hsi Tao-lung between 1253 and 1278 from seeds brought from China.