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United States had a Potomac Park as a show garden for cherries on a scale that resembled the best of the cherry picnic places in Japan. Every spring the Park revived, and continues to revive, a nationwide awareness of the cherry. In Europe the general public was slow to warm up to the cherry. No large-scale planting of cherries helped the plant present itself. It was through the world fairs that Europeans became acquainted with the cherry, as we will discuss later. A Botanist's Discussion The classification of Japan's flowering cherries started as any discussion among taxonomistswith some articles that drew little attention. Entering the twentieth century, Japanese flowering cherries played a role in diplomacy between the United States and Japan, inflating the meaning of the plant and its taxonomy, and making researchers rush to conclusions. It would take a whole book to tell the history of flowering cherry taxonomy, and that is not our purpose here (see Russell 1934, Ingram 1948, or Kawasaki 1982.) But in reconstructing the discussion on sato-zakuragarden forms, however, we can shed light on some human factors in cherry taxonomy as well as clear up a major classification problem. Broadly speaking, garden forms are classified according to two schools, a Western one that lists them under Prunus serrulata Lindley and a Japanese one that lists them under P. lannesiana Carrière. The schools are discussed below. In Transactions of the Royal Horticultural Society (1830), John Lindley described a flowering cherry that was brought from Guangzhou, China, in 1822 by Joseph Poole, a plant hunter for the Barr and Brookes nursery in Newington Green, London. A herbarium sheet with Lindley's cherry is kept in the Cambridge University Herbarium, but no flowers are found on it. However, in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, an old tree of Prunus serrulata Lindley is found. It must be a descendant of the material that Poole brought; the characteristics of this old tree easily fit Lindley's description. In spite of the incomplete herbarium, the identity of P. serrulata presents no major taxonomic problem. It is a double-flowered, slightly less gorgeous strain of 'Ichihara-tora-no-o'. Important in this context is an illustrated article by French botanist Élie-Abel Carrière (18181891) in 1877 about his Cerasus serratifolia Lind-