By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 9, 2007; B01
Remember the balmy weather of December and January and the panic over the early blooming of Washington's cherry blossoms?
False alarm, government tree expert Rob DeFeo said yesterday.
There were cherry trees that did bloom in the crazy warmth of this crazy winter. But those trees were not THE trees.
DeFeo, the wry chief horticulturalist with the National Park Service, took to the microphones in a swanky District hotel to announce that the city's famed cherry blossoms, the ones that annually draw a million visitors and plenty of dollars, should bloom pretty much on schedule and peak the week of April 1.
"Barring the advent of an ice age or the rapid acceleration of global warming," DeFeo said, the pink and white blossoms of the hallowed 3,700 trees along the Tidal Basin should reach their most glorious around April 4.
Good old cherry blossoms, he said, "most reliable living specimens in the nation's capital."
Amen, said the organizers of the 95th National Cherry Blossom Festival, who joined DeFeo and D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty in the Mandarin Oriental hotel to announce that the annual festival will run from March 31 to April 15, at the start of the spring tourism season.
Opening day festivities will be March 31 at the National Building Museum. The cherry blossom parade will be April 14 along Constitution Avenue, followed by the Japanese street and arts festival along Pennsylvania Avenue. There will be 90 events in all, including fireworks April 7, and 200 cultural performances and demonstrations, said the festival's executive director, Diana M. Mayhew.
"As mayor of the District of Columbia, I couldn't be more thrilled to help kick off the events," said Fenty (D), who will preside over his first Cherry Blossom Festival as the city's chief executive. In the District, which reaps $150 million annually from out-of-town festival-goers, "hospitality is our big deal," he said. "It's our big industry."
Fenty took note of the festival's plan, for the second year, to have valet bicycle parking.
"As a cyclist myself, that is fantastic to leave your bike for free and having it left in a staffed area during the entire time of the festival," he said. "I'm telling you, as a cyclist, that's a really big deal, because that's a big worry: Where are you going to leave your bike?"
The festival honors the original gift in 1912 of 3,000 cherry trees to the United States from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo.
On March 27, 1912, first lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first trees on the north bank of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park.
"For two weeks, year after year after year during the festival, our nation's capital becomes Japan town," said John R. Malott, president of the Japan-America Society of Washington, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and is sponsoring the post-parade street party.
This year's festival will feature, among other things, a work of installation art by Yoko Ono, widow of slain Beatle John Lennon. The work by Ono, who organizers said might attend the festival at some point, is called "Wish Trees" and will enable festival-goers to attach written wishes to the empty branches of the trees.
Yesterday's events culminated with DeFeo's pronouncements.
Afterward, he explained the source of the early-bloom scare.
"There is a particular variety of cherry, not the one on the Tidal Basin," that can bloom in the autumn during warm weather, he said. "What happened was it was warm in December, and the tree would bloom." And people worried about a too-early bloom.
Happens a lot, DeFeo said. "Wrong tree."
The right trees "are not going to be early," he said. "They're going to be right on time."
Details on the festival can be found at http://www.nationalcherryblossomfestival.org.
