Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Cherry Blossom Festival: Nature’s Timing and New York’s Celebration
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
April 29, 2017
Dearest reader,
On this day, the New York Times, ever the chronicler of city life, announced with great anticipation that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s cherry blossom festival was set for today and tomorrow — “regardless of when nature decided to push play.”
A daring statement, don’t you think?
To schedule a celebration of ephemeral blooms on human time, when every gardener knows the cherry blossom obeys only her own clock, not the turning of ours.
One imagines the scene: rising pink clouds of petals above strolling crowds, parasols and paper fans, laughter under trees that could open their hearts one moment — and flutter their blossoms to the ground the next.
The festival, known as Sakura Matsuri, has always been that delicate balance between reverence and revelry.
But how curious that even in 2017, we still braved the hubris of dictating the schedule of flowers!
Tell me, dear lover of gardens, do we celebrate the cherry trees, or do the cherry trees graciously permit us to celebrate beneath them?
Perhaps that is the unspoken pact between people and petals — that we may plan, and hope, and gather… but ultimately, we must yield to nature’s timing.
After all, what gardener has not stood in the rain of imperfect blooms and thought: this is the moment — fleeting, fragile, utterly divine.
So as the New York Times tweeted its confident decree, the cherry trees may well have rustled softly in reply, amused at our ambitions.
“Push play,” indeed!
For even in Brooklyn, where human rhythm quickens the air, nature keeps her own tempo.
Let us, then, take a cue from those pink and patient teachers — to bloom when ready, to celebrate when full, and to fall, if we must, with grace.
