When I Saw This Photograph I Was Reminded Of The One Liner,

'what do you call a big bonsai?'

a tree! and although this at first looks like a bonsai it is in fact a tree, photograph Wrath of Gnon, Daisugi is a centuries-old forestry technique developed in Japan as a way of cultivating the highly-prized Kitayama Cedar without actually using any land, dating back to the 14th century, daisugi allowed for the cultivation of Kitayama cedar, a species of tree known for growing exceptionally straight and lacking knots, in a time when high demand and lack of straight land for planting enough trees made growing Kitayama cedars impossible. Similar to the famous art of bonsai, daisugi basically involved heavily pruning a so-called “mother cedar tree” so that only the straightest shoots are allowed to grow. Careful hand-pruning is conducted every couple years, leaving only the top boughs and ensuring that the shoots remain knot free. After about 20 years, the now massive shoots can either be harvested as exceptional Kitayama lumber, or replanted to repopulate forests, 

according to Twitter user Wrath of Gnon, whose tweets on the ancient Japanese forestry technique went viral recently, Kitayama tree stocks could support dozens of straight shoots at a time, and could be used for up to 200 – 300 years, before being worn out. These “mother trees” can still be found in certain areas of Japan, and some of them have trunks about 15 meters in diameter, so there you have it, not bonsai, a tree!