Tsukigase Plum Grove

Most people meet Tsukigase as a viewpoint first. From Ichimoku Hakkei, at the top of a steep lane on the Oyama side, you look down on the gorge with plum trees spread over both slopes and the river at the bottom. The view is the reason to come, and it is a good one, but it is not the whole place.

The trees were not planted for looking at. Local tradition dates the first plums to 1205, at the Tenjin shrine of Shinpuku-ji temple, and says that in 1331 a court lady fleeing with Emperor Go-Daigo taught the villagers to make ubai, plums smoked black over a fire. Ubai was the mordant that fixed safflower red dye and it sold fast to merchants in Kyoto and Osaka; by the early 19th century there were said to be close to 100,000 trees. The Confucian scholar Saito Setsudo wrote an account of the valley in 1830, writers such as Rai San'yo followed, and in 1922 it became a national Place of Scenic Beauty. Wartime food drives cut many trees down, and the Takayama Dam, completed in 1969, turned the gorge into Lake Tsukigase. About 10,000 trees remain.

Go between mid-February and March, when the Tsukigase Baikei plum festival is on and the area is free to walk. Allow at least an hour and a half for the groves around Shinpuku-ji and the Tsukigase plum museum; a full circuit across the river takes most of a day. The slopes are steep everywhere and the paths are narrow. On festival weekends the car parks fill and charge a fee. On a weekday it is quiet, and in a late year the higher Tenjin grove can still be in flower when the lower slopes are over.

The bus is the hard part. Nara Kotsu runs only about three a day from Nara, about 80 minutes each way, so the 9:00-ish departure and a mid-afternoon return is about the only workable plan. Take snacks and cash.