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Foreword For several years in the 1960s I would pass each day, on my way to and from work, a large specimen of Prunus sargentii. It grew in a garden beside the road, its branches soaring above the boundary wall in a great wave, which in spring carried an abundance of pink single blooms ahead of the coppery emerging leaves. I enjoyed it then, delighting in its exuberance and charm, and was always sad to see its brief spring beauty fading to be replaced by the lush dark canopy of summer foliage. Come autumn, however, my eyes again searched eagerly for this tree as its leaves, encouraged by the cooler nights, changed from green to a blaze of bonfire shades that burned ever brightly and then were gone, leaving only the bare branches dark against the sky. Imagine then my joy when, in October years later on my first visit to Japan, I saw this cherry in the wild, its leaves staining red the black forest and lighting like flares the gray mist of a Hokkaido * dawn. I have enjoyed the Japanese flowering cherries ever since, as a boy, I lay on the lawn at home trying to catch the falling petals of a pink-flowered tree that probably was 'Kanzan'. 'Kanzan' was then, and still is in many areas, the most popular and commonly planted of these trees. Bold and brazen in the sheer exuberance and predictability of its blooming, 'Kanzan' was in part responsible for opening my eyes to the variety of Japanese cherries in the gardens of England and available in the many nurseries of the day. It was at the nursery of Hillier and Sons in Winchester and later at the Hillier Arboretum near Romsey in Hampshire that the ornamental riches of this group really caught my imagination. To Western gardeners, the Japanese flowering cherries rank with the magnolia, the peony, and the lily in the aristocracy of garden flowers. They offer something special, and yet appreciation of their quality and charms is not by any means a prerogative of