Bulletin Board

Plant of the Month

'Dream Catcher' Flowering Cherry
'Dream Catcher' Flowering Cherry

Location: Grid U-6 East side of the gravel road south of the kiosk

Flowering Cherries are popular all over the world, probably partly because they are the first group of flowering trees to show a lot of color in the spring. They flower before their leaves emerge, so pretty much all you see are flowers when they are in bloom.

There are lots and lots of different Flowering Cherries, and their taxonomy is complicated and not always known. They have been hybridized and cultivated for hundreds of years, especially in Japan. Most of them are listed as zone 6, making them somewhat marginal for hardiness in our climate.

With all that breeding, there is a huge range of different growth forms and colors in Flowering Cherries. There are colors from pure white to dark pink and growth forms from upright columns to narrow weeping. Most of them do not set fruit or if they do, the fruit is small and insignificant. `Dream Catcher’ is a selection from the National Arboretum in Washington D.C. It is a seedling of ‘Okame’, another Flowering Cherry which we do not have in the Arboretum. The ‘Dream Catcher’ in the Arboretum was planted in 1997.

Monthly Projects

I think pretty much every year for the 22 years I have been at the Arboretum we have had a stretch of nice weather in February when I tell people that there will be days in April when we wish the weather was that nice—and that has certainly been true this year. We had quite a bit of winter in April with snow and cold temperatures. The good news is that so far it seems like there has been surprisingly little damage. The Magnolia flowers were just starting to open when the worst cold arrived and I fully expected them to be toasted, but they are showing very little damage.

We were able to get out between snow storms and plant our newest project, a Golden Chain Tree tunnel. It is in the open space between the two ponds, on the west side of the stream.