‘Winter is in my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.’
Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
With no little irony in the midst of World War II, a U.S. Navy WAVE specialist (photographer) Third class was posed among the springtime cherry
blossoms near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. The cherry trees had been a gift from the city of Tokyo to the U.S. government. Some
3,020 saplings were culled from the banks of the Arakawa River and the first were planted along the Potomac River’s Tidal Basin on 27 March 1912.
The blossoming trees soon became popular with tourists, and what eventually became the Cherry Blossom Festival began in 1934. After World War II, cuttings from the Washington trees were sent back to Japan to replace the trees around Tokyo that had been decimated by U.S. bombing.
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