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The mother of the cherry blossoms

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore’s love of the beauty of the cherry blossoms sparked the first lobbying campaign to plant the Japanese trees around the Tidal Basin.

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Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore is seen in this undated portrait. Enchanted by the culture of Japan, by 1894 she had been pestering federal officials for almost a decade to plant some of the gorgeous trees she had seen in Tokyo around Washington's reclaimed Potomac River mud flats, she would say later. She attended the first planting in 1912.

Photo by Wisconsin Historical Society /

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