Zelkova

It's all about hiking Mount Fuji or walking the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage, for example.

You get detailed maps, and even that old-school Lonely Planet advice that doesn't exist anymore, like this one from the Cicerone Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage book, says, follow the path behind the shrine and begin ascending a stone staircase next to the Zelkova tree growing around a boulder, zigzagging uphill into the forest.

Now, this is the kind of writing that transports you directly onto the pilgrimage path and allows your imagination to take over, propelling you through the forest.

And I mean, to me, it's a completely different experience.

So that's 557 species of bird food compared to something like a tulip tree that supports only 21 or something like ginkgo that supports zero.

Zelkova supports zero.

So if you go down the street, you see an oak tree.

Is it defoliated? Is it, you know, no.

And it's, it's, because these trees are 500 years old, it's, it's like imagining, you know, these crazy twisted junipers that you see in the Sierras or Ponderosa pines, just the deciduous kind of form of that, and that's not often expressed, uh, in, in deciduous bonsai art.

So, that's very different than a broom style Zelkova, which is the, your common street tree.

Um, having these trees growing in extreme environments and extreme conditions in the deciduous side of things, I think is not necessarily explored yet.

Um-