The Yoshino Cherries of the Reservoir

Everyone knows Washington's cherry trees came from Japan in 1912. Fewer know New York got a gift the same year: a planting of Yoshino cherries along the Reservoir's east side, sent alongside the 3,020 trees that went to the Tidal Basin and somehow left out of the story that made the capital famous for its blossoms. Thirty five trees stand there today, city designated as a single Great Tree entry rather than thirty five separate ones, which is the honest way to register a planting nobody experiences tree by tree. They bloom white shading to pale pink each April, usually a week or two before the Reservoir's showier Kwanzan cherries on the opposite bank, and the flowers carry a faint almond scent the plum colored Kwanzans do not. Here is the part no one advertises: Yoshino cherries rarely live past sixty years even with good care, and nothing in the historical record says whether the trees blooming today grew from the original 1912 shipment or replaced it at some point since, the way Washington's own planting has been replanted in stages for a century. So the honest claim is not that these particular trunks are old. It is that this exact stretch of path has carried the same seasonal show, on the same imported species, since Woodrow Wilson's first year in the White House.