SEEDS from the “miracle lone pine” tree in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, the only tree on its beach to survive the tsunami triggered by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, will be stored at the Millennium Seed Bank in Britain as early as this year.
The conservation facility stores seeds to safeguard wild plants against extinction driven by natural disasters and development.
The original tree died in 2012, just a year after the massive earthquake. But over nearly 15 years, researchers cultivated genetically identical successor saplings and collected their seeds, ensuring the lone pine’s genetic line survived.
By preserving these seeds for future generations, the project aims to pass down the memories and lessons of the disaster.
The campaign to preserve the miracle pine for future generations began in April 2011, just a month after the disaster.
About 60 members of the pine rescue project – including researchers from Tokyo-based Sumitomo Forestry Co and volunteers from landscape gardening businesses in Iwate prefecture – gathered along the coast of Rikuzentakata.
Authorised by the municipal government, team members collected branches from the lone pine standing amid the debris.
The goal was to propagate successor saplings and harvest their seeds, amid fears the pine would not survive the damage caused by the seawater.
“We wanted to pass down the genetic legacy of the lone pine – a symbol of our recovery – to the future,” recalled Yoshiei Yonai, 71, then head of the Japan Landscape Contractors Association’s Iwate chapter.
The project team pursued its quest to grow successor trees, moving the cuttings to Sumitomo Forestry’s facilities in Ibaraki and Saitama prefectures.
In their bid to resurrect the tree, researchers relied on grafting – a technique with a 2,000-year history.
The method involved attaching the harvested cuttings directly to the living branches of another established, rooted pine.
Alongside the cultivation of the successor trees, a project took shape to preserve seeds at the Millennium Seed Bank in Britain.
In 2012, the year following the disaster, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which administers the bank, approached Sumitomo Forestry to request seeds.
While the plan was initially abandoned because no seeds could be obtained, Kew approached the company again in October 2024, and the agreement was finalised in May this year.
The seed bank, located at Kew gardens’ wild botanical garden Wakehurst in Sussex, southern England, preserves 2.5 billion seeds from about 40,000 species – representing about 15% of the world’s plant species – in a vault at minus 20°C. — The Yomiuri Shimbun/ANN
