The upcoming spring season brings about the return of their blossoms to our beautiful city. Some of them went to Manhattan, and many of the rest landed right here in Washington DC. In a gesture of good relations, the small island nation in the far east offered up a large batch of their impeccable, locally grown cherry blossom trees. The source of that beauty dates back more than a century to 1912 when the United States received a gift from Japan. “I wish it was sunny just for pictures, but it’s kind of nice to not have the crowd.As we continue to bury our faces in our scarves and coat jackets, braving the long cold of winter, an element of incomparable and majestic beauty stands in the near future. “I think they’re beautiful,” Sharon said. “So the urban forester has sleepless nights worrying about the stand of either 3,700 cherry trees or the remaining of the 20,000 trees in general.”ĭespite all of these challenges, the cherry trees’ pink blooms remain beautiful, even on the rainy day when Beth Chen and her friend Maureen Sharon set out for a stroll around the Tidal Basin. “So that leaves us in an area that requires a terrific amount of maintenance and monitoring and worrying,” Morrison said. They also monitor the trees for diseases, which can decimate stands where every tree is the same species, like the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin. The Park Service puts down woodchips to help replenish the soil and has started pruning fewer branches to keep the trees’ canopies intact to better protect their bark from the sun. It takes a year-round effort to combat these changes and keep the trees healthy. Cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin on March 25, 2023. Hotter temperatures have made the trees more likely to get sunscald on their bark, which Morrison likens to sunburn. Rising tidal waters have introduced pollution and heavy metals into the soil where the cherry trees grow. The flowers aren’t the only part of the trees that have been impacted by climate change, according to Morrison. And that’s on one tree, and that’s very, very unusual,” Morrison said. “Today, I was out looking at the cherry trees and one tree might have portions that are in full flat wood, other portions where the flowers are still developing. But he’s noticed other changes in the trees’ blooms due to climate change, including areas of the trees’ flowers developing at different rates. Morrison has incorporated other data, like solar radiation, to help improve the Park Service’s predictions. Maybe they’d be 60% effective or something along that line,” Morrison said. “But now, it seems to be with the environmental changes, that model seems to be kind of failing us.” But recently, that model started coming up short. His team had been using Growing Degree Days, a measure of heat accumulation. He’s also part of the group attempting to predict peak bloom yearly. Morrison oversees 20,000 trees at the National Mall and Memorial Parks, including 3,700 cherry trees. It’s no easy task and, according to Matthew Morrison, arborist and urban forester at the Park Service, forecasting peak bloom has become even more challenging in recent years. The Washington Post, NBC Washington and the National Park Service all take a stab at guessing the correct date. Trying to predict the cherry blossom bloom is a popular guessing game around Washington, D.C. “But it was a tremendous benefit because I had a friend visiting who, peak blooms were on her bucket list, so it worked out perfectly.” Friends Maureen Sharon and Beth Chen admire cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin on March 25, 2023. “The weather is extremely unusual,” Chen said. This was followed by a cold March that slowed the blossoms down, leading to peak bloom on March 23, according to the National Park Service. But a warm February sped up the flowers’ development. While monitoring the status of the blooms on the website BloomCam, she figured the trees would reach peak bloom in April, too late for her friend, Maureen Sharon, to see them on her visit to Washington, D.C. Beth Chen had been tracking the status of the Tidal Basin cherry trees for weeks before her visit on a drizzly March 25.
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