ShawneeDispatch.com

Each year about this time, the nation’s capital puts on a show.

The occasion is the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, and Washington, D.C., is truly resplendent, with all manner of flowering shrubs, bushes and trees.

The wife and I took in this annual extravaganza last week, combining it with one of our periodic jaunts to visit our daughter and – of course – our youngest grandson, who will be 2 this summer.

This was our second attempt to catch the cherry blossoms. Last year we were too late. We got there around mid-April, only to discover that virtually all the trees had already shed their blossoms. This year we were determined not to be too late, and we succeeded. Actually the dates for this year’s festival are March 28-April 12.

The festival commemorates the gift in 1912 of 3,000 cherry trees from the mayor of Tokyo to the city of Washington, in the words from the festival Web site, “honoring the lasting friendship between the United States and Japan and celebrating the continued close relationship between our two cultures.”

In that year, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first trees on the west bank of the tidal basin in West Potomac Park.

The spirit of friendship and cooperation was further reinforced in 1915 with a U.S. gift of flowering dogwood trees to the people of Japan. Groups of schoolchildren re-enacted the planting of the first trees in 1927, and the first festival took place in 1935, sponsored by civic groups in the capital.

However lasting the friendship may have appeared in 1912, it was strained by events of the 1940s, though I don’t think anyone gave any serious thought to cutting down the trees. At any rate, the festival was suspended during World War II, resuming in 1947.

The exchanges of plants have continued in recent years. First Lady Lady Bird Johnson accepted 3,800 more trees in 1965. Then in 1981, Japanese horticulturists were given cuttings from some of the U.S. trees to replace Japanese trees which had been destroyed in a flood.

The festival was expanded to two weeks in 1994 to accommodate a diverse and growing schedule. This year it included fireworks, a parade, walking and bike tours, paddle boat rides, Potomac dinner cruises, and a host of concerts and performances on a special stage near the Jefferson Memorial.

We drove into Washington from Manassas, where our daughter and her family live, and were early enough to find a parking place in one of the free public lots near the Jefferson Memorial. From there it was a short walk to the blossoms. That was fortunate indeed, as although the temperature was in the 50s, the brisk winds made it seem quite a few degrees cooler.

According to the festival organizers, more than a million people visit Washington each year to admire the blossoms and view the events that mark the coming of spring in the nation’s capital. I’d vouch for the number, but Washington is so crowded it always looks like there are a million people around anyway.

So, our visit to Washington was a success. I might say, however, that getting to Washington in time to see the cherry blossoms means that the drive to and from must be accomplished without the added comfort of any greenery along the roads. For roughly 1,100 miles each way, we drove through forests and forests of bare trees – trees which in just another couple of weeks will be adorned in their spring finery.

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