Stop to admire the cherry blossoms
These trees have a place in history — and politics
Berlin is a city of stone on sand. Cobbles cross the pavements at irregular angles. Grey, russet, pewter, brown. And for much of the year, the skies are the same. Silver and unsaturated. But I came to associate Berlin instead with a particular shade of pink: fuchsia sunsets, the ripple of cherry through white ice cream. Spring in the city was coloured with flirtation, like bubble gum or confetti. Clouds of blossoms covered the trees.
My first home in the city reminded me of the film “The Lives of Others.” The landlord, an American artist, had furnished it with vintage East German furniture and left the rooms unrenovated. Floorboards wobbled and plaster peeled and a balcony overlooked the path where the Wall once stood. The day I moved in, the landlord showed me to the cellar — where people once dug escape tunnels, he added, as if it were a selling point — and gestured towards the storage unit that came with the apartment. I couldn’t stop staring at the walls, the sections where brick and mortar had been patched. I never went into the cellar again.
I took to walking and cycling along the Wall’s route.
The Mauerweg (Wall Trail) traverses the old borders of the city, tracking along forest roads, city streets, and the depths of lakes, is a space that could — and in some ways should — devastate us. But in spring, I learned, it is also the ground from which the cherry trees grow.
Upon the fall of the Wall in 1989, ten thousand cherry trees were gifted to the city by a donation campaign led by Japanese television station TV Asahi. They were planted in the symbolic space left by the Wall: blossoms meant to unify a severed city once again. Following suit, other streets in the city were planted with cherries. They line the streets of my old Kiez, grow in our last apartment’s courtyard, and pepper the lawns of local parks. In spring, along some of the most visited sections of the Wall, luminescent flowers cluster on the trees, calling locals from the grey weight of winter.
Each year, I want to drink in their colour and beauty, as if I could carry it through the year. Unimaginably light, they seemed frivolous even, in a city where so much once felt too heavy to hold.
Cherries are trees whose histories can be captured in movement: the fruiting European cultivars were brought to North America by settler-colonists, and the hardy North American timber cherries went in the opposite direction. That the ornamentals are often called by their Japanese name — sakura — speaks of a similar transience.
Perhaps because of their short blossoming season, which was easy to miss entirely, these flowering cherries were largely overlooked in favour of more edible Prunus species when first seen by Western travellers on plant-collecting missions in the eighteenth century. Once encountered, they inspired exalted prose. Robert Fortune — the Scottish plant collector who made his name gathering plants across East Asia — described the doubleblossomed cherries as “the most beautiful objects, loaded … with flowers as large as little roses” and marvelled at the way their petals fell “like thin flakes of snow.” Recounting a visit to Japan in 1907, Marie Stopes — a British suffragette, scientist, and eugenicist — wrote of blossoms “like great clouds touched rosy by the setting sun” and which felt “like whipped-cream when you kissed them.”
But despite this novelty in the West, the sakura has long been central to Japanese culture.
An 1893 handbook for young Japanese botanists explained tree anatomy with reference only to the sakura, its leaves, roots, and branches as the prototypical Japanese tree. The trees invite festivals in their honour, with such celebrations speaking to the cherry’s role in centuriesold agrarian cosmology: a healthy and well-timed flowering signalled a good rice crop each year. After the eighth century, when the imperial family began hosting annual celebrations of blossoming trees, hanami (flower viewing) grew in popularity amongst urban dwellers, with many composing and reciting poetry about the ephemeral beauty of the blossoms.
By the turn of the twentieth, the gifting of sakura trees became a vital component of Japanese diplomacy. Japan’s gift to the United States, a shipment of trees courtesy of the City of Tokyo, arrived in 1912.
Three thousand cherry trees were planted along the
Tidal Basin and Potomac
River in Washington, D.C., that year — a gift of friendship. The White House sent dogwoods in return.
These gifts of trees have graced the cities I’ve called home: In 1959, Toronto was presented with two thousand Somei-Yoshino trees, in a project led by first-generation Japanese Canadians and the Japanese consulate. In 2019 in London, the first trees from a gift of more than six thousand cherry trees were planted in several of the Royal Parks, with the rest to be planted across the country. The thousands that have been cultivated, packaged, and sailed or flown across the globe in the name of friendship and diplomacy.
But the cherry blossom’s symbolism is not straightforward. Though for many centuries the sakura had been associated with vitality, towards the end of the nineteenth century, falling cherry petals became associated with precisely the opposite: death.
The late-nineteenth-century philosopher and militarist Nishi Amane explicitly positioned the cherry blossom in opposition to the peony and rose of Sharon — emblems of China and Korea, respectively — noting that cherry blossoms had the good decency to fall from the tree before decaying. By the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, this association between the cherry blossom and empire was cemented: planes were painted with the emblem of a single cherry blossom. Women waved pilots off with blooming branches, and tokkoÌtai pilots (kamikaze) flew to their deaths with sakura pinned to their breasts.
And the cherry blossom was not merely deployed as symbol: actual trees were planted across occupied territories like Korea and Taiwan, and existing cherry trees were sought out and maintained. It was an intervention in the landscape intended to turn colonised land into Japanese land, and thereby inspire the same transformation in people.
The mobilisation of nature in service of imperialism and nationalism is by no means isolated to Japan: The environmental historian Alfred Crosby famously argued that the age of exploration not only brought “new-world” plants like potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco back to Europe, but also was followed by the planting of European flora across newly colonised terrain. Where colonies were established, plants that reminded the colonisers of home usually followed.
That nonhuman nature — from blossoms to birds — remains fraught with the baggage of human history seems to me somehow unfair. It seems, at best, to centre human narratives in a world far more complex than us. But this is a world we’ve irrevocably transformed; little in the work of transplanting and introducing species across the globe seems guided by fairness. In the wake of human actions, the trees remind us there is no neutral nature, no blank wilderness. Still, I wonder how these symbols we’ve made might reply to the stories we tell about them. As our world warms, the sakura stands as sentinel for anthropogenic climate change.
Since at least the 1930s, Japanese scientists have been collating data on cherry blossom festivals: when historic festivals fell offers a unique insight into temperature changes over time. And accounts of Japanese cherry blossom festivals go back much further than usual datasets on flowering trees: abundant records stretch back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — with some reaching back to the ninth century.
The data show that cherries have typically bloomed over a six-week range from late March to early May. By the 1980s and 1990s, the cherries began consistently flowering earlier than at any other time over the past 1,200 years.
In Berlin 2019, I was often outside. The temperature most days hovered well above freezing. It was the second winter in a row I’d left my parka packed in a vacuum-sealed bag under the bed; the second without snow. Autumn-flowering cherries in my local park blossomed more fully than I’d ever seen before. A year earlier, I’d read about cherry trees in Japan that had blossomed in October, a trick of the temperature after a year of extreme weather. The flowers were smaller than those of springtime — the size of a quarter — but fully formed, the petals tightly stacked and luminescent. Instead of snow, pale petals dusted the ground in January.
When the cherries bloomed again in March, the pandemic was upon us. Wearing masks and sunglasses, my husband and I strolled with our dog beneath the cherries along the path of the Wall. We marvelled at their pinks against the grey. This was a land marked by loss. That spring, it seemed wondrous to me that cherry blossoms could hold the weight of histories laid upon them, even briefly, before the flowers fell again.
EXCERPTED FROM “DISPERSALS” BY JESSICA J. LEE. COPYRIGHT 2024 JESSICA J. LEE. PUBLISHED BY HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE CANADA LIMITED. REPRODUCED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH THE PUBLISHER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.