The tree is a southern magnolia at the St. Francis Hospital, known as the Urakami Daiichi Hospital at the time of the atomic bombing, located in Nagasaki City's Komine-machi. The Urakami Daiichi Hospital was a three-floor brick and ferro-concrete structure. A modern building at the time, the hospital was originally the Nagasaki Catholic Theological Seminary, then a Canadian Franciscan Seminary, before becoming a tuberculosis sanitorium called the Urakami Daiicihi Hospital in an effort to avoid the building being forcibly requisitioned by the army during the war.

As the hospital was located 1.4km from the hypocenter, at the time of the atomic bombing the building's interior was instantaneously destroyed by the blast wave, and the medical equipment and most of the medicine was burnt in the subsequent fire, leaving only the shell of the hospital standing in-tact. From the small hill upon which the hospital stood one could look across the whole of the Urakami district, burnt to cinders. As the hospital was the only medical institution left in the fire-devastated Urakami district, many hibakusha received medical treatment or died there.

Tatsuichiro Akizuki, who was a doctor at the hospital, wrote in his book Shi no Doushinen (The Concentric Circle of Death): "Day after day the concentric circle of death expanded." He described the fear of death, while he was caring for the people dying in the Urakami Daiichi Hospital, as the places where people were dying gradually spread out in a concentric circle from the hypocenter, and that circle started to approach the hospital.

This southern magnolia bares striped scars burned on to the central side of the trunk facing the hypocenter, showing us not only the after-effects of the atomic bomb but also silently standing where it always has as a living witness attesting to the history of this place from before the war until the present day.