Project 365 day 176: cherry blossom

The National Trust designated 24 April Blossom Watch day, to encourage us all to observe and spend time with the many wonderful trees which are currently in bloom, and one of my oldest friends posted a photo of a wonderfully lush flowering cherry tree on Facebook. She wrote that it is un a garden at the corner of her road, and she remembered rocking and soothing her baby son under it soon after they moved there; she commented that as he is now 27, the tree has been bringing her joy every spring for more than a quarter of a century. I can't think of a single tree with which I've had such a long relationship, I have moved too many times, but in 1991 we bought a 1970s Leech semi on a road planted with cherry trees. My study window looked out into the boughs of the one on our small front lawn, and I loved it. Nine years later, with a growing child and a wheelchair to accommodate, we decided it would make more sense to move to  a bungalow than to try to fit a through the floor lift into our modest sized house, so we moved two streets up the estate; within three months, the new owner of our former house had removed the cherry tree. She never saw it bloom. I told myself it was no longer mine to love, but I found it hard to forgive its destruction.

This tree is in the hedgerow just along the road. I love the rich, russet tones of its newly unfolded leaves. Houseman's poem becomes more poignant with every passing spring.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.