Page 195
Figure 80 'Koshi-no-higan' is an early flowering and most elegant triploid spring cherry still hardly known outside Japan. Photo by the author, 30 March 1997, Kyoto * Botanic Garden.
Prunus ×yedoensis, Somei-yoshino The history of Prunus ×yedoensis is closely related to the history of the modern nation of Japan as explained in "The Nation's Flower" in chapter 1. As the national flower, it was planted throughout the country and is found now in many other parts of the world. It was exported under the name Yoshino cherry in the early twentieth century and might still be found under this name in the West. This might lead to confusion with cherries from Yoshino, that is to say, the Japanese mountain cherry (P. serrulata var. spontanea). In fact, the advice to refrain from the name Yoshino is almost a century old. Breeding experiments by Y. Takenaka using the Oshima cherry (Prunus serrulata var. speciosa) and the Edo-higan cherry (P. pendula f. ascendens) resulted in cherries closely resembling P. ×yedoensis. This led Takenaka to conclude and publish in the 1960s that 'Somei-yoshino' originated as a hybrid of the two. The regions of distribution of both parents overlap at