To hate or not to hate: A DC Story
Posted by Nathaniel.
The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington DC right now. Kirsten and I have never seen the spectacle that is 3000 Japanese cherries in bloom, so this Saturday we drove down to check it all out.
Here’s the takeaway: if you read in the news that 1,000,000 million people are going to be somewhere to do a thing, you don’t want to be doing that thing as well. There wasn’t enough room to turn around, much less get a good picture of the blossoms. Throw in the normal DC problems of lousy parking and confusing streets and you have a recipe for disaster.
It would have been really cool if there were no people though. The trees were very impressive, although they’re also looking pretty old. I’m not sure what the life span of a flowering cherry tree is, but some of the trees are starting to look pretty old and a little bit diseased.
April 1st, 2008 at 3:08 pm Using
Apparently the cherry trees can live quite a while. There’s one that’s claimed to be 1500 years old. Cuttings from it were planted in DC in 1999.
It’s also interesting to note that the first cherries shipped over in 1912 were burned by the Department of Agriculture because they were terribly diseased and infected with insects.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:17 pm Using
Yeah, it’s a pretty nice mid-week trip when the traffic isn’t so bad.
Also, cherry trees often look/are diseased, probably due to foreign-introduced blights, etc. A 15-year-old sapling will have nice smooth bark, etc, but older trees always look beat up. Part of their charm, really, kinda like a bulldog.
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm Using
Growing up in China, I think I’m quite used to being surrounded by a huge number of people, hehe.
I haven’t seen a cherry tree ever, I think. Is public transportation good in DC?
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:39 pm Using
Parking: that’s why you park at the Greenbelt station, and take the metro in. Parking’s free on weekends, you know. I was actually in DC as well on Saturday. Some college friends came down, but our original destination was Chinatown, to see the Stephen Colbert portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, and to eat lunch in the boarding house where the Lincoln assassination was planned, which is now a Chinese/sushi place. We wandered over to the Mall then, but never got near the cherry trees. Lots of people were flying kites, though, which was pretty cool. It was chance that we ended up there during the cherry blossom festival.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:55 pm Using
It was the national kite festival too, that was why so many people had kites on the mall and around the Washington monument.