Japanese Flowering Cherries by Wybe Kuitert (free)

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Barr and Brookes nursery, but Lindley had described a cultivated plant to which Camillo Schneider added in 1906 the cultivar name 'Albo Plena'. Thereafter the plant was known in Europe as Prunus serrulata Lindley 'Albo Plena' Schneider. This cherry served Manabu Miyoshi in 1916 as the type for the large-flowered garden cherries. The name Prunus lannesiana is forty years younger and takes us back to 1870 when a flowering cherry was sent to the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris by the French statesman and general Napoléon Auguste Lannes, the Duke of Montebello (18011874), whose father had fought with Napoléon Bonaparte. This plant was reportedly from Japan, but whether Lannes had traveled to the Far East or how he otherwise obtained this plant still remains a question. This cherry was a grafted pot plant less than half a meter tall when it was described by Carrière in 1872 and published under the name Cerasus lannesiana. A colored lithograph of the cherry appeared a year later. No herbarium sheet was made, nor does a living specimen of this plant exist. Furthermore, it is doubtful that a flowering cherry could be correctly described from a potted plant. As a graft it would have been influenced by the rootstock; the young plant's flowering suggests a stock of 'Mazakura'. The description calls to mind 'Mikuruma-gaeshi' or a pink, single, and large-flowered garden form close to the Oshima cherry. Carrière's cherry had its flowers in umbels rather than corymbs, which is not a typical characteristic of the large-flowered garden cherries, all of which have corymbose inflorescences. Grouping garden cherries under the name Prunus lannesiana Carrière, as Wilson did, is not very convincing, but because this was the first single-flowered Japanese cherry described, it was easily interpreted by Western botanists as the ''wild" parent form. Ernest H. Wilson (18761930), a botanist at the Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, had traveled extensively and many times through China from 1899 to 1909, for the Veitch nursery and later for the arboretum. "Chinese" Wilson, as he was nicknamed, not only botanized but also bought many plants from flower shops and nurseries. He imported many good cherries for the arboretum from the Yokohama Nursery Company in 1903 and 1904, but could visit Japan only ten years later in 1914 to do the field research on these cherries. On his travel he was at times accompanied by Gen'ichi Koidzumi (18831953), who had just published his extensive study on the Japanese rose family. Wilson visited the Arakawa collection and had discussions with Japan's best garden-cherry specialist,


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