We just maintained the population from the commercial nurseries,' says Robert DeFeo, the National Park Service's chief horticulturist for the National Capital Region. 'We really didn't have a program to propagate replacements from the original trees. In the 1980s, Jefferson devoted the last years of his career to collecting, evaluating, and preserving flowering cherry germplasm, in collaboration with the arboretum's shrub-breeding research program headed by the late Donald R. Jefferson and other botanists and landscape architects as saying something should be done to preserve the original cherries.

Last spring, a Washington Post newspaper article quoted retired National Arboretum botanist Roland M.

Not unexpectedly, it's estimated that only 125, or about 4 percent, of the original trees remain. The surviving trees from the 1912 gift that surround Washington's Tidal Basin will be 87 years old when their blossoms open this spring. Trees don't live forever, and Yoshino cherry trees average 40 years. Those were given as a thank-you to President William Howard Taft for his support of Japan during the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, when he was U.S. Dix has grown the new trees, Prunus x yedoensis, from cuttings taken from the original Yoshinos. Over the past 2 years, arboretum horticulturist Ruth L. National Arboretum in Washington to thank for a special gift-500 cherry trees propagated from the Yoshino trees presented by Japan to First Lady Helen Herron Taft in 1912. They bring money to the local economy and take home photographs and memories of the beautiful blossoms.įuture visitors will have the U.S. Resplendent cherry trees from Japan ring the Tidal Basin at Washington, D.C.Įvery year, nearly 600,000 tourists come to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C.

Cherry Blossoms-Restoring a National Treasure

Tidal basin cherry trees