On the first warm night of spring, at the end of a particularly exhausting day of work and news, a friend to see if I wanted to come for a drink on her deck. There was an urgency in the message – When? Now! She gathered where he might also be in the area, who turned out to be three other people on a Thursday evening at about 7.30 am.
All this was her cherry tree, a monumental Kanzan that left about two-thirds of her Brooklyn-Oachtertuin and a part of that next door. It was in peak bloom and it may not be that beautiful in four days or even tomorrow.
Last Saturday, 22,000 people, a number larger than the seating capacity of the Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and they paid no less than $ 22 to take the long double rows of flowering cherry trees that bow to each other in a spectacular tree cathedral. There are 26 cherry tree varieties in the garden, including the Kanzans that pass the cherry walk; Most of them cultivars, instead of natives, and the first of them were planted in 1921.
The Kanzan is especially excellent, because the pink double blossoms can each contain no fewer than 28 petals. The flowering period is short – usually only a week, maybe two – and rain or a significant temperature shift will limit it.
There are few more powerful metaphors in the botanical world for the temporary nature of beauty and the need to seize whatever chance could come to experience it.
A few days after viewing my neighbor, I became a member of Adrian Bentepe, the president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, for a walk through the cherry -aplanade. It was a clear Tuesday afternoon and it seemed as if the entire city had posted an office emoji on Slack.
In Japan there is a term – Hanami – for practice, centuries old, from gathering to look at cherry blossoms, a ritualization of appreciative pleasures. A Japanese office worker does not have to lie to her boss about where she is when she chooses to leave in the middle of the working day to participate. In the morning, some managers can even send a mutual interpretation to explore a location to later picnic a location and to release that person part of the day.
Our own cherry blossom heritage is much thanks to Japan. In 1912, as a gesture of goodwill and friendship, the country The government sent more than 3,000 cherry trees to the United States. A first shipment three years earlier had been lost at sea. The trees that arrived in New York were planted in Morningside Heights, near Riverside Church, on the land that would later be called Sakura Park in honor of them. Various parties were planned in 2012 to commemorate the centenary of the gift.
This geopolitical connection was tense in 2025, with the policy leader of the ruling liberal Democratic Party of Japan Call the Trump administration to reconsider the rates of 24 percent on Japanese goods that announced it.
Mr Bentepe, who had been the Commissioner for Parks of the City for ten years from 2002, has noticed more and more people who came to the garden – to escape, he speculated, the wider ‘unrest’. And donations remained very strong in the past year, even if other cultural institutions struggled in the city. The garden established a record for money in a year without a large capital campaign.
In a largely secular urban world, parks and gardens are easily compared to churches. A decorum is required, a feeling of the devotional, a congregation that is enthusiastic about the awe of the Divine.
Flanking The Cherry Corridor are the Liberty Oaks, planted in memoriam of those who died on 11 September. As it happened, Mr Benepe had buried his mother on September 10, 2001. The following afternoon he went to Central Park and was stunned by the crowd in the sheep pasture. It seemed so discordant – all those people who gathered under the late summer sun in the midst of the shock and tragedy. But only a space so open, green and huge, he started to understand, could really absorb the scale of so much sorrow.
This year’s cherry season coincided with Mr.’s own mourning. Benepe. His father, Barry Bentepedied last month at the age of 96. In the mid -seventies, the older Lord Bentepe founded the green markets of New York and started a national movement during a period of urban collapse and a need for rebirth. From his initiative, the network of farmers’ markets of the city grew to be the largest in the country.
But New York has always delivered more than it needed in terms of his horticulture and green life. Elgin Botanic Garden, One of the first public gardens in America was founded in the early 19th century on the site of what is now Rockefeller Center. The garden had an educational orientation. Under the steward of David Hosack, one of the most famous doctors of his generation, Many plants were grown for medicinal purposes.
In the coming days, tens of thousands of more New Yorkers will continue to look for cherry blossoms-on which many may be in post-blom, a phase that has its own attraction. Even in their hereafter, fallen and covering the ground, they are medicines of a kind.
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