Daisugi: The 600-Year-Old Japanese Hack for Growing Trees on Trees

Facing a 15th-century shortage of both cedar seedlings and the land to grow them, Japanese foresters in the Kyoto region developed daisugi (台杉, “platform cedar”): a method of cultivating new, perfectly vertical shoots directly out of the base of an existing tree. The result looks like an open palm sprouting a cluster of straight trunks — essentially bonsai principles applied at full scale to production forestry.

The technique was driven by demand. Sukiya-zukuri architecture was fashionable among nobles and samurai in the 16th century, and tea master Sen-no-rikyu reportedly insisted on flawless Kitayama cedar, but raw timber was scarce. Daisugi let growers harvest repeatedly from the same root stock without felling and replanting, curbing deforestation while yielding taruki — slender, straight beams prized for teahouse roofs.

The payoff was material as well as aesthetic: the harvested wood is described as roughly 140% as flexible and 200% as dense and strong as ordinary cedar, making it well suited for rafters and typhoon-resistant construction. Six centuries on, the practice survives in Kyoto and stands as a rare example of a forestry method engineered around resource constraints that still draws admiration worldwide.