National Cherry Blossom Festival Kicks Off March 31st in Washington, DC

The 2007 National Cherry Blossom Festival is scheduled for March 31st - April 15th in Washington D.C. Many festivities are planned over the two-week festival including the parade on Saturday, April 14th. The Grand Ball will feature the coronation of the National Cherry Blossom Festival Queen who will be adorned with a crown constructed of over two pounds of gold and 1,585 pearls. The magnificent crown was donated by Yositaka Mikimoto, President of Mikimoto Pearls, Inc. in Japan. It is ceremonial and only worn for a few minutes because of its weight. The Queen is given a miniature crown of gold and pearls to wear during the rest of the festival and to keep forever after.

I attended the festival in 2006 for the first time and highly recommend that if you are planning a visit to our Nation's Capital, it would be worth planning your trip during the peak weeks of cherry blossoms. The cherry blossoms, providing a full spectrum of pink shades are accented by blooming white, pink, and wine-colored azaleas. It is the most collective, explosive display of thousands of blooming trees and shrubs I have ever seen in my travels across America. What really took my breath away is the beauty of the blossoms as they wrap around each of the nation's memorial monuments - as if to blanket us in comfort and ease our pain of remembering America's fallen and our nation's greatest leaders. In Japan, the flowering cherry tree is equated with evanescence of human life and is one of the most exalted flowering plants.

It all started in 1885 when Ms. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore returned to Washington from her first trip to Japan. She approached city officials with a proposal to plant cherry trees along the Potomac. For 24 years, her requests were denied. In 1909, First Lady Taft, who once lived in Japan, heard Mrs. Scidmore's request and agreed that it would be best to line an avenue with them. The first 90 trees were planted by the Lincoln Memorial, but it was discovered that the trees were not correctly named and disappeared.