Members of the group are volunteers who represent Washington's civic, government, and business communities. Besides coordinating the festival, the group organizes seminars, museum exhibits, and other activities to educate the public about Japanese culture.
"The festival is great because it appeals to a broad range of people," said Sneyd. "There is something for everyone to enjoy. And for people with families, the low cost or no cost for most events keeps them coming back."
Keeping the Trees Healthy
Maintenance of the cherry blossom trees, like for any other plant, requires watering, fertilization, and pruning. Caring for the 3,750 trees has been a challenge for a government agency that has seen its budget shrink considerably over the past eight years.
The average life span of the trees is 50 to 60 years, "but if well taken care of [they] can last up to 100," which makes caring for them laborious, said Robert DeFeo, chief horticulturist of the National Park Service.
The Japanese cherry blossom trees in Washington are a monoculture—a single kind of organism grown in a specific area. This makes them more susceptible to the spread of diseases and insects. "Each year we lose between 50 and 100 trees, which are replaced by American commercial nurseries located within a 200-mile (300-kilometer) radius of Washington, D.C.," DeFeo said.
The cherry blossom trees are propagated from sapling cuttings, making them basically clones of one another. But, "even if you go to the same nursery for ten years you will get genetic diversity," DeFeo noted.
There is still one threat the trees are not immune from regardless of the hardiness and diversity of their gene pool: frost.
The National Park Service has no elaborate system in place to protect the blossoms in the event of sporadic freezing temperatures in Washington, according to DeFeo. "We would not be able to do anything to protect the blossoms," he said. Nonetheless, he pointed out, "We would never experience temperatures that would threaten the life of the tree, only the life of the blossoms.
"Years ago when there were warnings of frost," he added, "they used to put up the fan heaters like in citrus groves, but we don't currently have that technology."
One thing the National Park Service does to help ensure the trees' healthy survival is twice-yearly pruning. It takes a team of eight to ten people three months to complete the job. "Japan keeps calling us asking us what it is we do to maintain our trees because they look so much better than theirs. And it's just a matter of pruning," said DeFeo.
Only about 100 to 125 of the original cherry blossom trees—known as "witness trees"—are left today. Identifying which ones they are is virtually impossible because the records are sketchy, although documents indicate that nine of the original trees were transplanted onto the grounds of the Library of Congress and the Washington Aqueduct.
This year 69 trees propagated from those original specimens were planted in Washington to ensure that the genetic lineage survives.
Join the National Geographic Society, the world's largest nonprofit scientific and educational organization, and help further our mission to increase and diffuse knowledge of the world and all that is in it. Membership dues are used to fund exploration and educational projects and members also receive 12 annual issues of the Society's official journal, National Geographic. Click here for details of our latest subscription offer: Go>>
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
